converting an old rotary phone to work now

[Wade Garrett]

If it's got a red wire and a green wire, hook those up to the matching wires in your house phone line.

[gfretwell]

POTS lines still support rotary dial. I have 2.

[adambrandam36]

found no speaker for the mouth so thats resolved

[adambrandam36]

[adambrandam36]

i get a beep beep then dead air, i dail and then the same happens. Do i need a POTS?

[gfretwell]

If you are trying to run this on VOIP (cable modem, Magic Jack etc) you need to find out if your hardware supports rotary dial. The Telco usually does, actually it may still be in their tariff that they have to.

[gregz]

Need adaptor I think available.

Greg

[trader_4]

It's quite amazing that in all this you have yet to tell us what phone service you have that you're trying to connect this rotary phone to.

[adambrandam36]

Telus, im in canada.

[trader_4]

So Telus looks to be an internet, cable, etc company, not a traditional phone company that offers pots. You need a converter to go from rotary pulses to DTMF tones, like this:

That should work for basic dialing or "push 2 for English". Beyond that you will likely have problems, eg good luck getting it to work with any system you interact with where you need to enter a hashtag, etc. But if you're just using it for a nostalgia phone, converter should be fine.

[adambrandam36]

got it working but think one of the capacitor for the ringer is not working

[gfretwell]

Do you have the green and yellow shorted together? You need that to get it to ring right. (party line thing)

[Scott Lurndal]

[e-mail] writes:

If it is a WE 500 series deskset, then there is a terminal block under the cover that has a setting for party-line vs. normal. If it is configured properly, then only the tip and ring (green and red) conductors are required.

Likewise for the 300 series. I've both active on a standard POTS line.

Other than a defective ringer (extremely rare) there are common reasons old Western Electric phones don't ring. The two most common reasons are 1.) A previous owner disconnected one or all of the wires from the ringer going to the network inside the phone to prevent the phone company from "seeing" his/her phone on the phone company's line test equipment or 2.) The phone was wired for "party-line" service which will prevent the bell from ringing on today's "individual line" systems. Let's cover reason #2 first. If your phone was originally wired for "party line" service many decades ago you will need to do some simple modifications of the wiring inside of the phone to make it ring. Referring to the schematic you just printed from the link above, you will see vertical shaded bars dividing the schematic into sections representing, among other things, the ringer, the network, the handset, the dial and the line-switch (a.k.a. the hook-switch.) Note in particular the wiring for the ringer leads, line cord, and line switch. In the schematic you will see color designations of R, BK, S, S-R, G, and Y. These refer to wire colors of Red, Black, Slate (gray), Slate with Red stripe, Green and Yellow, respectively.

[jaret smith]

I have a Philips Electrical Works...It looks different inside, from the western. I have it hooked up, green and yellow together on the green. The red is with red. Do i have to have the adapter, to get it to ring? Right now it wont ring. I understand you need the adapter to dial out. doesnt.

[gfretwell]

Before I went any farther I would find someone with a POTS line and try it there. If that works your VoIP adapter is the problem. If everything else works you might have to live with an electronic ringer.

[jaret smith]

i got the Telephone Module Pulse Transfer Dual Tone Multiple Frequency DTMF Converter. The phone dials out but it wont rind when someone calls me, whats wrong and what do i have to do?

[jaret smith]

i have hooked up the Telephone Module Pulse Transfer Dual Tone Multiple Frequency DTMF Converter and it now dials out but i still cant receive calls it wont ring, what do i have to do?

[trader_4]

IDK? Link to the module?

[gfretwell]

Sounds more like someone disconnected the ringer, a pretty common thing to do with an "illegal phone" (before you could buy a phone or hook one up if you did come up with one). The Telco could tell how many ringers you had but not how many phones. The wires may just be cut. There will be 4 going to the coils on an old Western phone, probably the same on a Stromberg.

[Scott Lurndal]

If it is a western electric model 500 deskset, the ringer may be disconnected or connected in party-line mode. Look around on the internet for WE500 wiring diagram.

It may also be that the voip adapter doesn't provide sufficient current to drive the ringer.