converting an old rotary phone to work now

[gfretwell]

You get around the party line thing by connecting the green and yellow together.

[Ralph Mowery]

I did not catch the VOIP. If so you are probably correct. I have VOIP and an old Sothwester Bell Freedom phone. One of the slim types. It will not ring the bell and neither will the touch pad so I can not dial out or answer any of those calls that say press a number. It will answer and talk.

[trader_4]

Presumably that's why the OP said this:

"i got the Telephone Module Pulse Transfer Dual Tone Multiple Frequency DTMF Converter"

You would think the converter, to be useful, would generate the ring voltage, but who knows. Which is why I asked for a link to whatever it is that he has.

[Scott Lurndal]

That's not precisely correct. You remove the shell of the phone and move a connection on the terminal block from one terminal to another.

The yellow and black wires (on the modern POTS side) are N/C.

Red and Green (Ring and Tip) are the only wires connected.

Scroll down to "do you have a model that doesn't ring".

[gfretwell]

A rotary dial phone would have had a 3 wire line set, red, green and yellow. The 4 wire line set came with the Princess phone. "It's little, it's lovely and it lights". (via a wall wart that put voltage on the yellow and black for the light bulb)

[Scott Lurndal]

Nonsense. I've three WE500 and one WE300 desksets. None of them had three wire for the POTS service. POTS service has always been two wire (tip and ring); the yellow and black wires were used for lighted dials (with a transformer on premises) on certain model phones. In some installations, the yellow was tied to local ground.

Look at the Bell wiring diagram noted above.

[gfretwell]

The yellow and green on the old 3 wire line set was used for selective ringing. I had a party line in 1984 and I know this for sure. You must just be young if you never saw 3 wire line cords. The 4 wire cord did not come out until the Princess phone in the 60s.

They also used 3 conductor station wire until the Princess.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

The house I'm in now was built in 1969. The old phone wire is

3-conductor (red/green/yellow).

I grew up in a house with a party-line phone. IIRC, that just had 2 wires.

[gfretwell]

There may only be 2 coming in from the street but inside the house party 1 is on the red/green and party 2 is on red yellow. I found this out when I hooked up a phone in a house I was renting in 84 and I didn't know it was a party line. When I did the normal green yellow connection at the Dmark my phone rang when it was for me or the other guy. The other guy ended up calling the telco because I was on the line when they answered a call The phone man is the one who told me about the yellow and green thing. I was red/yellow.