I've got a R11 jack in the finished basement that is dead. Well not completely. Pick up phone and there is an very low hum in the line, no dial tone. Changed phone, same thing. Changed R11 wall jack, no change. I think it's now digital system, changed from analog (POTS) as my antique dial phones upstairs do not work without a tone converter.

Anybody have a suggestion on which butt set to buy? A bunch of them out there, Greenlee, Fluke, et al. Has to be touch tone, my phone system does not recognize dial pulse, only tones. I will have to check each pair coming in from the telephone interface and it is a rat's nest of wires that I can make no sense of.

Don't want to mortgage my future but if I have to spend $$$ I will have to. IIRC base service call is a hundred dollars and up from there but I could be wrong.

Sounds really complicated. Try an easier approach first.

Have wife pick up phone that is having problem with it. Either cut or remove your wires one by one to all the jacks in the house. Have her hold a cell phone on speaker while yours is on speaker. When she hears the buzz go away, she yells, "it stopped". At that point reterminate all the wires except the one you identified as the bad pair. Touch again to terminals/110 block, if buzz comes back you have reconfirmed that is the problem line. Switch from Green/Red to Black/Yellow pair on phone jack, if you are lucky you only have one damaged pair. If it's Cat5 you have 3 other pairs, telephone cable 1 other pair.

What phone system?

I used to manage digital switching equipment, ground start, loop start, Nortel BCM, CICS and so forth, and all can have similar symptoms presented, but be from different causes based on the system/type in question.

If you can provide what equipment you use, and service, more information the better, someone will be able to help.

cordless phones are like $20. Then none of this matters.

Just a home system, single line. Was POTS, went to Uverse then to Direct TV. When Uverse was installed AT&T added a telephone interface network on an external wall. Four wired R11's upstairs all work. Only one plug downstairs, that's the bad one.

The one thing I saw, the wires to the jack are red and green. Everything that is visible downstairs is white with tracers, orange, blue,etc. So I am not sure what cable pair is feeding that jack. Or for that matter, where the joint is.

I have not done anything to disturb the wiring so I am kind of at a loss, no AHA moments of what happened to the wiring.

I made a butt-set way back when I had to turn in my real one. It's a cheap one-handed phone that slides open to talk and closed to hang up. Plug it's cord into one of those little square baseboard jacks and clip a couple of wires with alligator clips into the jack.

I have one I can loan. Need to make sure it works.

My first suggestion is to unplug all the other phones in your house, and test one at a time. But as radioman said, a simple fix is a cordless phone. You only need one jack to work, and you can have base units scattered around the house.

Do you need a landline? We haven't had one in years, but we get one free of charge that plugs directly into our cable modem. Just another option.

The external interface should also have some test ports. A very cheap fix would be to open it up, and just plug in a jumper (long plug-in phone cord with male ends) and run that into your house.

It's an easy fix, and as cheap as you want to make it.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
... When Uverse was installed AT&T added a telephone interface network on an external wall. Four wired R11's upstairs all work. Only one plug downstairs, that's the bad one.

The one thing I saw, the wires to the jack are red and green. Everything that is visible downstairs is white with tracers, orange, blue,etc. So I am not sure what cable pair is feeding that jack. Or for that matter, where the joint is...

I'm doubtful that you will need a test set to find your problem. If I understand you correctly, at the jack that doesn't work you have many pairs of wires, but you're not sure where they are coming from?

If there is now a telephone interface on an external wall, look at it to see if you have those same multicolor pairs originating there. Look at each of the four wired jacks that are working to see what those wires look like.

The wires at your non-working downstairs jack are either coming directly from the telephone interface, or from one of the other wired jacks. The jacks could all have wires coming from the interface, or they could be daisy chained, as all of them are just wired in parallel anyway.

If you look at a jack and it has two sets of wires connected, one set is coming from the main interface (or another jack) and the other set is going out to another jack.

I really think if you look at all the jacks and the main interface, you'll get the picture and will know which wires should be connected to the downstairs jack. Or you'll find the origin of the many pairs at the downstairs jack and you can pick any pair to use.

The only other possibility is that there is a splice somewhere else, where wires and colors change. Even then, I'd want to find that splice rather than trying to test a bunch of pairs hoping to get lucky. That can be a lot of combinations if they used wires from two different pairs.

Is that making sense?

EDIT: Also, try switching the polarity of the two wires currently hooked up to that jack. I'm not sure correct polarity matters, but maybe it didn't use to matter with the old analog phone lines and now it does. It could be as simple as that.

shovelhead,

Email inbound..

All good ideas. I'd add it might be an induction issue. If it was from a device, it could be a slightly-pulsed noise or steady.

In addition to the DIY butt set cable, you can make a tone generator. Take a music-playing device that uses earbuds. Cut the earbud cord and strip back a little insulation from both wires on both cut ends.

Disconnect the IW (inside wiring) in question and individually twist the exposed wires on the earbud jack lead to the IW-polarity doesn't matter. Plug in the music device (mp3 player, old radio, whatever) and turn it on. Go to the other end with the earbud side of the cut cord and touch to the IW pair and listen for music.

If you don't have home run wiring (dedicated IW to each jack), you might also have daisy-chain wiring or a splice to sort out.

I'm still a little unclear after reading. The 4 lines upstairs work with a standard phone? If so, it's still POTS.

As others have suggested, you may have a rat's-nest of splices somewhere. However, the "standards" are that for 4-wire, line 1 is on green-red and line 2 on black-yellow. For 4-pair, line 1 is on blue-white and line 2 on orange-white.

In your situation, for a 1-line household, you should have POTS on either green-red or blue-white.

If you're insistent on buying a butt set (hey, tools are like guns, you can never have enough!), the old gold standard was the Harris Dracon, which I have. I don't think they are made any more. (Ebay listings are calling them "vintage"....) I'd trust Fluke or Greenlee though.

Since you see a red green and a white with stains then there is a splice in one of the access points. The trouble you have could be caused by several different problems, but my first educated guess would be an open on one side. Dean

quote:

Originally posted by Cliff:
shovelhead,

Email inbound..

Email inbound to you also.

Thank you for your assistance.

I'm continuing to look today and check two upstairs points that would be the only logical point that the downstairs would be daisy chained from. Other than that it's back to the rat's nest in the workshop area.

How I wish I had been home when the Direct TV guy was there. This house was previously wired for Comcast. We had Dish, then Uverse and now Direct TV. A lot of old cabling that I want to cut but hesitate to. I took the router for Direct TV that the installer kind of dumped on top of a cabinet off and mounted it to a board mounted to the exposed floor joists in the workshop and rerouted the wall wort and input coax so it's all tucked up neat and into the ceiling. They didn't even zip tie the wall wort to conduit that was on the wall, just left the whole thing hanging by the wall plug.

Can you post some pics of the equipment and "rat's nest"?

Would help some of the guessing.

There can be a lot of things causing wire/connectivity issues.


If you have a 66 block, sometimes the crosscut connections and "punched" terminations will go bad due to oxidation.



The copper lines sometimes act as ground(s) or drain(s), between equipment, especially if there is voltage supplied to one or more pieces of connected equipment.

And in the presence of chemical reaction from pool chemicals, cleaning supplies and even exposed concrete over time.

Part of the problem is dissimilar metal of the copper and the terminals on the block.

I have seen some wire closets in use for over 50 years with no trouble, and others that have problems in a few months.

shovelhead, does the DirectTV router also serve as the ATA for your home Phone service? Is there an RJ11 on that device marked “phone” that is being used, perhaps jumpered to the so-called “rat’s nest”?

Or, does the phone service still originate from Telephone Network Interface/demarc?

striker1, No R11 connector on the router, the phone still is routed through the telephone interface outside. Only thing on the router was the wall-wort plug and the coax cable into it. Again, I think the phone service is digital as it does not recognize rotary dial pulses. To use my Western Electric 202 phone I had to get a DialGizmo, it converts rotary to tone pulse.

sigmonkey, loops of wire crammed in and around the floor joists over and under the duct work and a bunch of these:https://www.grainger.com/product/3M-2-Port-Moisture-Resistant-4FE28?cm_sp=Product_Details-_-Products_Based_on_Your_Search-_-IDPPLARECS&cm_vc=IDPPLARECS

I'm thinking that the 66 block would be the way to go, after I figure out the wire problem that could clean up the whole mess. I could mount it to the joists or next to the breaker box and generator transfer switch and really make it look better. I'll start looking on Ebay for one with the cover.

And while pulling the Christmas Tree out today I started taking a closer look tracing some additional wiring using four lead wire. It appears that the water meter remote wiring is routed through the phone system also. At least that was neatly installed, the water department stapled the cable to the joists. What a mess for a house that is twenty three years old at least in my view. One of the projects to tackle as a retiree is to straighten the mess up.

I have a butt set enroute so that will help. Also while moving dropped ceiling panels last night I found a speaker wire pair, now to find the other side of it, one of the previous owners hid his stereo wiring in there.

You might look at one of these to eliminate the wire ball.

Leviton bridge

quote:

https://www.grainger.com/product/3M-2-Port-Moisture-Resistant-4FE28?cm_sp=Product_Details-_-Products_Based_on_Your_Search-_-IDPPLARECS&cm_vc=IDPPLARECS

AKA Scotchlocks. These sometimes let the colored button back out, which allows the connection to loosen. They might not even be sized correctly for the gauge of wire used. My previous employer wouldn't allow them to be used inside of a house. One of these will easily leave you with a one-side-open condition (the hum).
You'll be much better off with screw-down or punch-down connections.

I agree. Automotive Scotchlocks were praised by many years ago especially for trailer wiring. Well until they found out that they would allow moisture in and corrode. Especially when they would allow the corrosion to migrate back into the harness past the junction point. I saw so much of that crap out west with the ranch trucks. Even though those telephone Scotchlocks are in a more controlled environment it still does not matter. Now I wonder if when I bumped the wiring I did something to it.

Once I get the butt set I'll start checking each side of the splice and go from there. It may come down to running new cable downstairs, may be easier than removing all ceiling panels and definitely easier than cutting drywall but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I took a long serious look at that wiring awhile ago but am now getting the nerve to attack it. I'm probably going to start cutting all that old coax out too.

striker1, that might be the ticket. At present five wired wall jacks in the home. I need to add one the opposite side of the basement for our fax machine and one for the garage.