🚀 go-pugleaf

** line eater food **

Bob recently posted a note here about a strange failure on a home
phone:

> ... Often I can't break dial tone with my touchtone phone ( its a
> GTE phone from before the breakup). Flashing the switch hook does
> break dial tone. ..

There are two basic reason that would cause this sort of thing:

1) The tone generator is off frequency far enough that the tone
receiver does not recognize the tones. I have seen this mostly on
the older phones using the LC type oscillator ( two big fat coils on
the under side). 

2) The audio output level of the tone generator is too low for the
receiver unit to hear. I have encountered this mostly on the newer
phones using a tone generator chip ( ususally the real cheap ones).

Bob didn't say anything about trying another known good phone on the
line in question, but that would be a good test to isolate whether
the phone or the line/switch is the problem. My experience with this
type of thing has been that the phone company reponds very poorly by
saying "It must be your phone and therefore is not our problem."
This is before they have done any checking what so ever....

Roger		uw-beaver!ssc-vax!clark