Antique Telephone with modern telephone ring problem

Hello all,

I've hooked up an antique telephone (Automatic Electric AE50A, I
think) in with the rest of my modern phones. The problem I'm having is
that either the antique phone will ring with the others not ringing,
or vise-versa. I would like both to ring. I'll provide more detailed
info later (i.e. which wires cause what).

Is anyone familiar with this?

Thanks in advance,
Dave

 

And before you added that "antique" phone everything was ok?
Old phones needed quite a bit of ringing voltage (~80-100VAC at 20Hz)
to get the ringer going. And if per chance you are not close to the
exchange you are at the signaling limit on your loop
which does no allow to connect to many phones at once. Wait if somebody
comes with an idea how to change the ringer in the "antique" phone.
rw

Was all mechanical.

 

The load factor of the phone is too high in relation to the newer type
technologies...

Jerry Greenberg

 

jerry posted:

Ok, I'll bite. What is the "load factor of a telephone."

Don

 

It's called a REN (Ringer Equivalence Number) It indicates how much
current is needed by the ringer circuit. Old style mechanical bell
phones have a REN of 1. Most modern phones have a REN far less than 1.
Part 68 says that the phone company should supply enough current to meet
the need of 5 REN's. Since he only has one old style phone, there
should be no problem.

Perhaps the OP was unhappy that the old phone actually rang when the
ringer signal was applied, whereas the newer phones tend to ring at
their own leisure after detecting the ringer signal's presence.

michael

 

michael posted:

----
I was hoping too see a response from jerry, who coined the "load factor" term.

I imagine he is just another guy with nothing meaningful to say, but wants to
post anyhow.

By the way, older phones may present a load equivalent to several 1 REN phones,
and since they pre-date the Registration rules, there is no way to determine
their REN short of testing. Also, many older non-Bell phones are tuned to one
of many frequencys, unlike Bell phones, which have had 20 Hz ringers just about
forever. Mixing old and new is a trap-shoot; you may get a hit or a miss and
you get what you get.

Don

 

Oops, sorry to interfere.

I forget the specific model number, but a "standard" phone was assigned
the value of 1 when the REN system was fabricated by ma bell. I don't
know why they couldn't just tell us how many watts (Amp-hours?,
Watt-seconds?) per REN. I suspect that one REN is something less than
20mA maximum current which really surprises me that it's enough power to
ring a rather large mechanical bell.

Lately I've been tinkering with a phone line powered caller-id display.
It just about working now, but I still get some bit errors mucking
things up. I did the 1200 baud FSK modem in software on a PIC chip. At
any rate, that's why I'm "in the know" on the REN thing. ;-)

michael

 

Thats kind of nasty. I usually find Jerry's comments worth reading. I
just went to the Yahoo home page and typed in 'ringer equivalent' and
got 15,100 hits. That seems meaningful to me. BTW, I have nothing
meaningful to say.
GG

 

GG posted:

And how many relevant hits did you get for "load factor of a telephone?"

 

Hi

The OP cleverly forgot to tell us which part of the planet they're on.
In England mechanical phones are REN 4, modern phones are REN 1. Total
max domestic load is REN 4. Hence connecting an oldie plus several new
ones is optimistic.

They're all 16Hz here, so at least no tuning issues.

Regards, NT