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Mel

Making fresh tracks
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Varmintmist

Bear, with furnture.
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I am not an electrical engineer but it should only take 48V to ring a phone. Why not just tape a phone ringing and play that back?
Nope, 48vdc is what operates the phone. Ring voltage is about 90 volts pulsating DC and it is enough to make you cuss. Its not AC because it charges a capacitor then stops and when the cap discharges the clapper rebounds. If the phone rang on 48, it would ring as soon as you plugged it in to the jack. Just a ding, one ding please. The only AC is what was made by your voice bouncing off the transmitter that was carried on the DC.

The freq varied for some party lines. You had different freq bells to change out that would ring different phones instead of ringing all of them with different rings, EG Mable gets 2 longs and a short, Ethel gets one long and a short. With different ringers, Mable didnt know that Ethel got a call because she rang on 30hz and Ethel rang on 60hz

As a bonus, you could wire the phone to ring off the ring side, OR the tip side so you could double the number of customers on the party line. And to make it more of a pain, there was grounded ringing....

Red Green Yellow Black isnt for 2 lines. It is Ring, Tip, Ground, and helper ground.

Yes, I worked on party lines. Yes I hate party lines.
 

Uncle-A

In the words of Paul Simon "You can call me Al"
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Nope, 48vdc is what operates the phone. Ring voltage is about 90 volts pulsating DC and it is enough to make you cuss. Its not AC because it charges a capacitor then stops and when the cap discharges the clapper rebounds. If the phone rang on 48, it would ring as soon as you plugged it in to the jack. Just a ding, one ding please. The only AC is what was made by your voice bouncing off the transmitter that was carried on the DC.

The freq varied for some party lines. You had different freq bells to change out that would ring different phones instead of ringing all of them with different rings, EG Mable gets 2 longs and a short, Ethel gets one long and a short. With different ringers, Mable didnt know that Ethel got a call because she rang on 30hz and Ethel rang on 60hz

As a bonus, you could wire the phone to ring off the ring side, OR the tip side so you could double the number of customers on the party line. And to make it more of a pain, there was grounded ringing....

Red Green Yellow Black isnt for 2 lines. It is Ring, Tip, Ground, and helper ground.

Yes, I worked on party lines. Yes I hate party lines.
From what I remember the green was the tip(transmit) and the red was the ring(receive) the yellow and black are more recent addition and they were used with phones that had a lighted dial. Many installers would not connect them on the older phones and the older houses only had a two wire cable going from the street to the house.
 

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