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jcarson83

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Anyone know of a good telecommunications forum that's as good as this one in activity. I've got an issue at work with a fire alarm panel, elevators, phone line quality and a bunch of experts that don't know anything. It seems to me that there may be someone out there as fanatic about telecom that we are about beer that may have the answer.
 
Well its a long story but here it is in a nut shell. I've have 5 lines running to a parking garage for emergency phones, elevator, credit card machines and a fire alarm panel. The fire alarm will connect to another modem on only one line out of the five and it needs two (a primary and a backup). They swapped out the dialer to make sure it wasn't and issue with that, didn't work. AT&T has been out there for two weeks trying to get lines cleaned up and get the talked back off. They claimed it was fixed but nothing has changed. So I have both sides blaming each other with no solution.
 
sounds like the wires may be crossed...I work in a wireless telecom switch, sometimes the recieve and transmit get crossed on the far end where the circuit lands from ATT to your premise, when ATT tests they are still getting send and receive signal because they jack into the circuit and make the wire look like a loop. loops dont care if wires are crossed. If the wires were cut that would be an easy find for ATT, but a simple cross is toooooo much for them to handle sometimes...its too easy of a fix.
 
Alarm circuits can be tricky. As a former Death Star employee (AT&T), it was one of the most common issues to pop up. Unfortunately, that union AT&T guy can't and won't fix someone's issue that isn't his.

Try http://www.systemswebstore.com/faqfiles/alarm_system_phone_connection.htm on how an alarm circuit works. If the modem is only grabbing one line either they don't have the other line wired correctly or the alarm guy is screwing his stuff up.

Step 1: Are both lines actually working?

Take a single line telephone and plug it into both outlets where the alarm modem is supposed to work from. If you have dial tone, dial this number on it (800) 444-4444. It will tell you what number you're dialing out on. Plug it into the other line and do the same thing. It maybe that they have one line run out there twice instead of two separate lines. If you don't have two separate numbers, call AT&T and tell them they are stupid.

If both numbers are there and work, then the alarm guy is stupid. Good Luck!
 
Its a little more complicated then that. This will throw you guys for a loop. I finally got a senior AT&T tech out there that showed up all puffed up and ready to show us how it was done. He had a filter he had rigged up that basically just added some line loss, 8db I think, because he thought maybe the line was to hot and the equipment was "too close to the office". This didn't work so my alarm guy showed him what was happening and he was really confused.

So after a little testing and checking the programming of all the numbers to make sure they were all the same he had the main office switch numbers. That is he had them take the phone number that worked and switch it to a different pair. When he did this the same phone number worked on the new pair and the old pair no longer worked with the new number. Well finally that was enough to show them they had an issue and it wasn't with my equipment or even the phone line but somewhere back at some control room somewhere.
 
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