Does anyone on here know a lot about analog telephones? I am trying to figure out how to wire this telephone up for a friend of mine and I am stumped because there are only three wires and I am used to phones having four wires.
The phone isn't quite working yet, but when I play with the hang-up lever (sorry, don't know the proper name), I can sometimes hear a dialtone. It's a start
Update 2: My voip adapter recognizes when the phone is hung up or off the hook. I successfully placed a call to the phone (though it didn't ring) and I could hear myself talking into the handset.
Audio to the earpiece is still very intermittent. I feel like the hook switch is maybe not making good contact.
I want to solve that audio issue first and then I will worry about the ringer not working
@MLE_online So for this one, you'd want to wire it for "metallic ringing", this is the line setup that you'd expect to see for a "normal" telephone.
Grounded ringing is where the ring voltage would be imposed on one of the wires only and use an earth ground on both sides to provide the return for the ring voltage. My limited understanding of this is that it provided a separate ringing path for party lines such that the ringer could be operated independently of the speech path, or to provide backward compatibility with old cordboards / exchanges in certain areas.
(For those PBX nerds out there, this is not the same thing as ground-start vs loop-start, but is related, sorta.)
@Stormgren Yeah, I got it ringing! After getting it wired for metallic ringing, i could see the dingalinger trying to move when I called the phone, but it couldn't quite manage to do it. A ringer out of another less-old phone works when swapped in though, so that new ringer is going to live in this old phone now.
@MLE_online Yeah, the "newer" coil mechanisms were a lot more efficient than the older ones are, the old ones require some serious current to move that little clapper around.
@Stormgren The odd thing is that that ringer would not work in the phone it came out of. It would try to ring, but couldn't ever quite manage it. So, I took it out and threw it in my parts bin. I have no idea why it wouldn't work in the phone it came from, but it works in this phone. I used the same ATA for both!
@MLE_online depends on how that phone was constructed. For example, I've seen some odd arrangements in some phones where some of them used a MOV, where they wouldn't pass voltage to the ringer coil unless it exceeded 60V. MOVs have a habit of breaking down over time as they fire, so who knows?
(Which is also why surge suppressors should also be replaced from time to time, but that's neither here nor there)
@Stormgren The phone it came from was just a western electric 2500. I took a ringer from another 2500 and swapped it in and that ringer works in that phone now. And now this ringer, formerly unable to do its job, works in a Leich 700. I don't get it.
@MLE_online you want metallic ringing (ringer is connected across the two line wires). grounded is for party lines and requires you give the yellow wire a ground. i dont think your ata can do grounded ringing anyway.
@MLE_online i think i see numbers molded into the plastic under the wires? you might need a lot of light. there may be a legend stamped in there somewhere. if nothing else it probably resembles the drawing layout.
My VoIP adapter does not have enough strength to ring the ringer on this phone (or there's something wrong with the ringer).
Fortunately I have a bunch of phone parts lying around because I kept grabbing old phones from the E-Waste at work, and this more modern ringer works. I may just swap this one in in place of the old one
God bless the Bell System for being such an insane monopoly that the ringer unit from a phone made 30 years later by a completely different company has the exact same footprint as its predecessor
Despite their very different appearance, the only incompatibility between the two of them is that the newer ringer has a little plastic tab for adjusting the loudness of the ringing.
The body of this old phone does not have a slot for that little tab to stick out, so I will have to ask my friend if they want me to cut the tab off and leave them without the ability to adjust the loudness, or if they want me to cut a hole in the bottom of the phone's body (antiques collectors hate this one trick)
@MLE_online I'm far enough behind that someone has surely pointed you at the "ringer equivalence number" (REN). I think that was something that came out of the destruction of the Bell System ... I mean, the breakup of the monopoly. Not sure older (real) phones have RENs but you can probably find a ref online that lets you estimate what you need to ring what will be the most awesome bell.
I will probably just transplant this newer ringer into my friend's phone and call it a day. It works and I'm not sure my friend cares about authenticity of the insides.
My Mom told me, a long time ago, that when I was a baby -- so, like, late '63/early '64! -- that a Bell (Canada) tech would come around every afternoon at nap time to silence the ringer on the phone. Even if you turned the mech ringer all the way down, they were still loud enough to disturb a baby, I guess. I have NO IDEA if this was just a story or if that was an actual service the telco offered. Hard to believe if true.
@MLE_online No idea! Maybe I should dig into that before anyone who would remember is dead (Mom died at the end of '19 but had been ravaged by Alzheimer's for several years before that). Hmm. I wonder if any phone books are online from that era? Off to archive.org!
@michaelslade The mic seems to work fine. The problem is that audio to the earpiece cuts out. I have to tap the hook switch a bunch of times to hear a dial tone and then I briefly here it before it cuts out again.
Talking into the phone's mic transmitted my voice to my cell phone, and I briefly heard myself in the earpiece of the old phone by talking to my cell phone before that also cut out
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