Is there a practical difference between the tip and the ring??

[micky]

I'm starting a new thread becuase this subtopic is very specific and goes beyond burglar alarms.

Is there a practical difference between the tip and the ring on telelphone lines, these days?

Could something (the alarm) work on DSL even though it's backwards, but not work on Verizon FIOS fiberoptic because it's backwards????

As soon as I get back from the store and have dinner, I'm going to reverse the wires no matter what people say, but I wanted to see what you folks would say.

For decades now I've ignored the difference between tip and ring, red and green. When I connected the alarm, I didn't pay any attention (even though speaker wire is polarized.) There was a time when touch-tone phones worked but not for dialing if they were backwards. They got around that 20 or 30 years ago. Or 40. Time flies.

My friend sent me a Youtube search list of how to connect, and as I said in the other thread, how can you go wrong. Even with the wiring drawing in the center of the screen it took me 2 minutes, but then I realized it was about latching, about running the phone wiring through the alarm panel before it gets to the telephone.

I thought about that 20 years ago when the phone line was only 20 feet from the panel, and decided it was too much trouble. That if the alarm wanted the phone line when I also did, we'd fight it out then. Because there are only two times the alarm wants the phone, a) for it's daily (nightly?) checkin, and b) when there's a burlary. Number a is not important if it misses a day or several and for b, I won't be home, I won't be on the phone, so it doesn't matter.

Now the internet is on the second floor and I hate to tell you but 4 days before the previous trip, I realized I didn't have time to wire it properly, so I used heavy duty speaker wire across the laundry room then up two flights of stairs and down the hall to the phone connections. I try not to step on th wires.

Otherwise, I'd have to run one set of wires down and another back up. More of a mess and for what? My friend is a pro and he has to do things right.

When you do it my way, a burglar can go straight to the phone pick it up and dial even one digit, and that will disable the alarm from calling in. Outside of a Hitchcock or Pink Panther movie, does anyone do that? I think so, but no one around here. After the alarm dials, picking up won't keep the alarm compnay from answering or the alarm from sending its messsage, will it.

My friend is a great guy but he's very impatient, consistently, always, when he's explaining anything technical to me. I just ignore it and he doens't hold it against me later. And I appreciate tha tin the first place, he didn't say installing the alarm was too complicated for me. He knew that I'd done the first one (which I found one morning with little wisps of smoke coming out of it. He gave me an exact replacement that didn't seem to work and hten he gave me all the parts for his brand of alarm (which he can communciate with remotely unlike the Ademco from

1983.)

(He's not just the owner of this place. When the business was smaller he did full-time installs when he wasn't doing sales.)

[trader_4]

The tip is one polarity, ring the other. Years ago I know where were some DTMF phones that would not DTMF if connected up backwards. They get their power from the line and it's like putting a battery into some widget backwards.

[micky]

I might have paid attention. The gold colored wire was on the red and the silver was on the green, like I would have done it if paying attention. The other end is hard to see.

Less borning stuff at the bottom.

I did reverse the wires and it made no apparent difference.

What seemed to make the difference was setting off the alarm by making a noise that the glass breakage detector didnt' like.

I proposed in the first place that if the system sent a test message, that might clear the code. I didnt' think of sendng an alarm because I couldn't arm the system, and it didn't occur to me that the fire alarms work even when the system is not armed.

I have a heat sensor near the furnace (that can only trip once and it has to be replaced, and it has to be pretty hot.)

And I have a smoke alarm not connected to the system.

And I have the original AC smoke detector that is now 42 years old and when last tested 2 years ago, worked fine. That one, I wired a relay in parallel with its buzzer and the secondary of the relay I connected to the Fire zone on the alarm panel, and it works because twice in the past when I fried hamburgers at too high a temp, the siren went off** and the monitoring company called me. There was room in the junction box to stuff the fairly big relay.

People are going to tell me that 42 years is too old, even though it works. The only way I could see that as true would be that there is more than one kind of smoke, and while it still can quickly detect hot grease smoke, it could be that it won't detect burning upholstery or burning wood or burning paper smoke. Is that possible?

**Instead of using the highest stove-top temp, now I use no more than 45% of the way between High and the end of the scale. That ended the smoke alarms.

I wrote my friend late last night and he wrote back that "the unexplained alarm signals were in the history of signals that never were successfully communicated to the central station. When the glass break detector went off the other signals followed."

I completely bought that until I thought about it. The signals during the day were from times I ran tests, using this command:

*6-mastercode-4 runs a system test. When [4] is pressed the panel will perform the following:

- sound the alarm output for two seconds

- light all lights on the keypad

- sound the keypad buzzer for two seconds

- test the main panel / PC5204 battery

- send a System Test Reporting code, if programmed (See Section 5.7 ?Communicator - Reporting Codes?).

There must have been reporting codes programmed or they would never have shown up at all, so why were they not enough to get through at the time they were sent but the fire alarm was?

Stil, I can th Full System Test We recommend that you test your system weekly. Should the system fail to function properly, call your installation company immediately for service. NOTE: Perform system tests at off-peak hours.

1. Inform the monitoring station that you are testing your system.
2. Begin with the system in the Ready state.
3. Perform a Bell/Battery test by pressing [ Q][6][Master Code][4]. The bell and keypad buzzer will sound for two seconds and all keypad lights will turn ON. Press [#] to exit. ....

It uses the same command to run the test and mentions all the same things the other instructions do, EXCEPT it doesn't say "send a System Test Reporting code".

By bell they mean siren, even though almost no one used a bell for decades before this was written. Even when addressing the homeowner, they're deep into "inside" language.

[Clare Snyder]

In on-premises wiring the first or only pair of inside wiring and jacks are color coded in green for the tip conductor, and red for the ring side. A second pair is coded in black for tip and yellow for ring. Tip and Ring are telephony slang for the two wires which make up the electrical circuit used for telephone wiring. Tip is the nickname for the electrically positive wire and Ring is the nickname for the electrically negative wire. The grouping of tip and ring creates a regular telephone line circuit. The voltage at a subscriber's network interface is typically 48 V between the ring and tip wires, with tip near ground and ring at -48 V. In general, ringing coming from every real phone company Central Office looks pretty much the same (but true rural phone companies can do whatever they need to). It's around 90VAC at 20 cycles per second, with a true sine wave, at about 5 REN.

[micky]

I'm reading the alarm manual again, as I have many many times, because it is so cryptic.

And I came across the part about connecting the phone, and they do specify which screw on the panel gets the tip and which gets the ring.

Maybe that is unnecessary, but they specify it.

Even though the wire from the panel to the phone is 30 feet long, the insulation on speaker wire is clear and one wire is silver and the other copper colored, and knowing me, I connected it the way I was told. But now it's reversed and I'm not changing it back until I get home from this trip.

Unrelated stuff. I learned, again, that if a fire alarm goes off on a Delayed Fire Zone, I have 30 seconds to press any key on the keypad, and then I have 90 more seconds to correct the problem. Then it starts over again. During my tests with the glass detector set up like a fire detector, the "problem", the alert condition, only lasted for a couple seconds. If it were a real fire, not sure what I could do in 90 seconds, but then the time sort of starts over again.

alarm, tampered or faulted conditions !! The following chart shows zone status under certain conditions: Loop Resistance Loop Status

0 (shorted wire, loop shorted) Fault 5600 (contact closed) Secure Infinite (broken wire, loop open) Tamper 11200 (contact open) Violated I didn't know about double end of line setup, just used single eol setup