I have a 1980's Binatone. It will only ring with the ring signal on the bell wire, not if you just apply it across the A and B wires. I kept it specifically for testing ring wires are working. Most modern phones only use the A and B wires and won't notice if a bell wire isn't working.
As someone else said, it's right at the bottom of the range.
You should disconnect the bell wire if at all possible. It interferes with your broadband. Had it taken off here and simplified the house wiring, speed went up from ~ 3Mbps to more like 6.5Mbps.
Since then dropped back a meg or two, unfortunately, as some scroats nicked 500 yards of the 400-pair from the next village and a new lot had to be spliced in.
That could probably be achieved with plenty of practice and the use of a stopwatch. Basically the procedure is timed from the start of the second ring - so the timer isn't caught unawares. The caller then hangs up after say five seconds to start with. The number of rings on stage is counted. The duration of the call is altered until the desired number of rings or half rings are achieved. After a while the caller can probably dispense with the timer with the stopwatch, and do it all in his, or her head. The person to act as the caller might be finally selected on that basis - their internal timing ability.
I can't see any reason why it should, if the caller in the wings has hung up.
michael adams
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If I was up against it, a sound effect is far, far easier to play in over the PA than try to fiddle about hoping the mobile network wants to play. Especially as, being village am-dram, signals are ropey at best!
Peversely, being in charge of SFX, the only effect I've run that had someone comment that it didn't sound real was an actual prop phone ringing. Argh!
An almost bigger problem is an actor having the right phone. I once went on stage with a view to making a mobile call in a scene when, with a ghastly cold sweat that's hard to explain if you've not trodden the boards, I realised I'd left my prop mobile behind. Thankfully I could dip into my other jacket pocket and pull out my actual mobile (which I wasn't ordinarily using as it was one from Nokia's weird-and-wonderful phase.)
:-)
Don't start me on mic'd sound in a village hall. Trying to explain to people that by the time they're speaking up enough for the mics to pick them up properly that they're hitting the back wall anyway is tiresome!
If the time period of the play was right you could just activate a whistle sound on a whistling one, the audience need not know it isn't hot. As mobiles are being discussed then you could record a custom ring tone featuring the whistle and hide the phone near the kettle .
G.Harman
And we have a winner :-)
After much swearing, fiddling, cursing, googling, shouting and getting nowhere as I had no way of increasing the PSU voltage I had a bit of a brainwave.
The other week I finally got around to opening up a home brew BS1363 socket-in-a-box that came my way about 25 years ago as I wanted a home for a general purpose motor speed controller. It looked like it had been built as a bit of home brew test gear and inside was a mystery transformer that I'd always assumed was an isolating type although, on closer inspection, only had 3 wires. This was slung in the trailer for going to the tip and the controller installed.
Then, after reading Peter's post, I got to wondering if it wasn't a step up/down job. I rung it out and reckoned it was a 1:2 job, although the way it had been wired implied it was giving 120v on the box socket.
Fished the transformer back out of the trailer, attached it to the output of the H-bridge, et voila, ~80v P-P on the scope. With fingers a tremble I attached it to the 2-wire phone and, as Leslie Phillips would say, ding dong :-)
So, thank you Peter for prodding me in the right direction. I knew that I was a bit on the low side but assumed that a rectify-and-power-a-sounder ringer would just be a bit on the quiet side rather than silent
Yes, I expected that and the Binatone was using 5 & 3 to get LED flashes. I'm going to build in a CO switch to switch between pins 2 & 3 as I've got all flashy and mounted a BT socket on the new case (it was the PSU upgrade that got me realising that it wasn't going to run new(!) phones.)
See my reply to Peter, got it sorted in the end - though I was still trying to build the damn thing into its new box during rehearsals!!
I attempted to feed the 30v into the 3-wire at the same time as sending a rining signal and nowt happened. But see elsewhere, got it going :-)
no - you had to see it steaming - I didn't write the play
and when we did this it was long before the days of mobile phones
Yes. When digital mobiles were just becoming common, many TV dramas wanted to show them actually working - lighting up and displaying the name etc. Experience showed never to do this all on one shot (ie live action) as the time it took to ring was extremely variable. So near always done as a cutaway shot.
But you'd see the steam on stage? Dry ice is the answer. ;-)
having that coming out of a kettle spout on cue?
anyhow, it's nasty stuff.
and I forgot to say "what do you then pour into the teapot?"
Oh indeed. However, I'd have thought the time a kettle takes to boil a given quantity of water from a given starting temperature would be pretty consistent? But maybe too long for the scene. ;-)
That was part of the problem, the other was that actors are not automatons
- their delivery varies from night to night.
Put a block of metal with a thermostatic heater set to 120C. Put a balloon with some water in it above it and pierce it with a solenoid at the Q. It will boil immediately.
So what worked?
Little bit of water, lot of power?
Water boiling offstage ahead of time, steam cunningly piped to kettle?
Thomas Prufer
Yes your 40Vp-p was only about 14V rms (if it was a sinewave) which is normally what is meant by "ac". So 40V ac minimum would be 2.8 times this p-p, i.e. 112v p-p.
Sinewave? Sinewave!?! We'll have none of those poncy things round 'ere! :-)
It's a fairly ragged square wave and I'd not thought about RMS values. The web pages covering ringer specs are a bit vague so I'd not thought about what they were really saying. It's of 50% duty cycle so similar values to your calcs tho.
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