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
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
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
