That's what I had in mind.
The phone company use to use wheatstone bridges to test line loads.
The wheatstone bridge is for resistance. They could test for line
length if the far end was shorted, and for poor insulation etc. It
didn't test for phones, which have almost infinite resistance when on
hook.
They could tell precisely how many phones were on a circuit.
Each phone had a ringer equivalence of 1.0. So they just measured the
impedance of the line to count the ringers. But that wasn't done with
a wheatstone bridge.
They quit that when they could no longer monopolize the home phone
market.
They didn't need to do it anymore because there was no need to, now
that anyone with a screwdriver could legally connect a phone they
bought at Radio Scrap.
I had the idea of disconnecting all my phones and the line at the
junction box and feeding a "bit" of voltage through to fry his gear.
(This would work with old phones prior to electronic touch tone
models. A loud ring and smoke then dead phone.)
There's equipment for checking phone lines, just most too expensive
and often unavailable to the common joe.
An infinity transmitter would do the trick. Just disconnect all phones
in the house and activate the IT. I could then listen to his
conversations.
You could just connect an amplifier to the line if you think someone
is using your line. Your original post did not sound like someone
else was tapping into and actually using your line, i.e. stealing
service from you. In that case, an easy way to prevent it would be to
put a short on the line whenever you're not using the phones. Then
the thief would just get a dead line. But that doesn't prevent
someone from listening when you are using the line. That's what I
thought you were talking about in the original post.
--
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###Got a Question about ELECTRONICS? Check HERE First:###
http://users.pandora.be/educypedia/electronics/databank.htm
My email address is whitelisted. *All* email sent to it
goes directly to the trash unless you add NOSPAM in the
Subject: line with other stuff. alondra101 <at> hotmail.com
Don't be ripped off by the big book dealers. Go to the URL
that will give you a choice and save you money(up to half).
http://www.everybookstore.com You'll be glad you did!
Just when you thought you had all this figured out, the gov't
changed it:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
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