• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Equalized Phone Line

Same here Dana. As strange as the thought is, they seem to be very reliable and sound great, without the noise of a real eq'ed copper pair.
 
Two years ago we finally pulled out two end to end copper pair program feeds. Been in there for 20+ years. Used our own EQ on them. Now using ISDN & IP.

Way back in the 70's the station had a backup program line that was nothing but copper. It was a good 30 miles long. Not many highs in that circuit. We discovered you could hook a pair of field phones to it. Cranking one end would ring the other! They later used it for the remote control. Kept having noise & loss issues. Telco did an audit and found it had 2 other pairs bridged on it. One going 6 miles to another station's studio (!?!) and the other just 3 miles of wire to an open end.
 
The field phone trick is a good one. Does anyone still use the trick of placing a switch in the center tap to ground at one end of the true dry pair and then a low current relay between center tap and a DC power supply at the other end? Poor man's remote control when it worked. I haven't tried it in 30 + years , but it saved my butt a couple of times.
 
bilco said:
The field phone trick is a good one. Does anyone still use the trick of placing a switch in the center tap to ground at one end of the true dry pair and then a low current relay between center tap and a DC power supply at the other end? Poor man's remote control when it worked. I haven't tried it in 30 + years , but it saved my butt a couple of times.

Motels in towns used to rent such lines so they could put a sign "out on the highway", and turn on/off the word "NO" before "vacancy".

There may still be one or two of those somewhere out there.
 
bilco said:
The field phone trick is a good one. Does anyone still use the trick of placing a switch in the center tap to ground at one end of the true dry pair and then a low current relay between center tap and a DC power supply at the other end? Poor man's remote control when it worked. I haven't tried it in 30 + years , but it saved my butt a couple of times.

Actually Gates and several other manufacturers of remote amplifiers used to build that function into the units that were designed for regular unattended broadcasts from fixed points like a church or business reports from a local brokerage firm. Patching the remote line through to the board would connect a low DC voltage through the center taps and ground to activate the relay at the remote location.

I once worked at a station once that kept an engineer at the transmitter and they used a dry line with field phones for the control room operator and transmitter operator to communicate.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom