Problems With Touch Tone Phones

[Lodestone]

Because of various obsessive stalker type Thai girlfriends, I've had to make it a regular practice of shutting off all my phones before going to bed in order to keep from being awakened at 4am by pointless drunken phone calls when I need to get up early for work the next day. This is of course not a problem with a mobile phone as I just power it down and it remains perfectly happy until I turn it on again. However, my apartment also has its own conventional direct dial land line, and for this I've been just been doing the naive simple minded approach of taking the receiver off the hook. I have two of these phones: one a 200 baht ultra cheapo I bought at Big C and have plugged into the extension by my bed; the other, next to my computer, a much more fully featured one with a digital display that came with the apartment. The cheap one's dial out ability died only some months after I bought it. Rather than the former digital tone for any of the keypad buttons pressed, I now get nothing and can't dial a number. I suspect that having the receiver off the hook all those times may've caused some special built-in, non-replaceable battery to drain and eventually die, but I've been unable to find anything to verify this.

The problem now is my other room phone seems to have a similar problem: a nice clear dial tone when I pick up the receiver but instead of a tone when I press a numeric button, now I'm getting a clicking noise: one click if '1' is dialed, two clicks if '2' is dialed, three for '3' and so on, almost like it has reverted from a touch tone to a kind of pulse dialed phone but without being able to actually dial out. Anyone know what's going on and if this can easily be fixed, or am I looking at just tossing it and buying a new one? The phone is a Luckyphone model LK-783.

[paveet]

Is there a little toggle switch that says 'tone-pulse' or something by the side of the phone which may have been pushed to pulse by mistake?

[Tony Clifton]

If not your phones, there may be a problem at the exchange. I had to argue for weeks about this with ToT who just wouldn't listen.

[longball53098]

Can I ask why you take the phone "off-hook"? This could cause the central office to temporarlly disconnect your line from the system until you replace the handset again,,,,,,,,,,,,,,in the old days a very loud tone was placed on the line after a time period to alert you the receiver was off hook,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,trying to alert the user the phone is in this condition,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,then after another time period the exchange system would disconnect your phone line as this was affecting their equipment,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,when you discover the handset issue and replace it the system now "sees" this and reconnects your line after another time period.

I don't know if the modern digital exchanges still do this but I would suspect so as a protective measure,,,,,,,,,,,,,,because if another 1000 people do what you do and "busy" the line out for no reason it is using system resources for no reason and another 1000 people cant make calls,,,,,,,,,,,

I would suggest that you simply unplug your phone from the cable to the wall jack,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,of course then you need to remember to re-connect again,,,,,,,,,,,,if its really an issue,,,,,,,,,,,,get creative and have a geek build a box with a on/off switch to disconnect the line. Or maybe you can buy an add-on like this somewhere?

[paveet]

infact, a lot of newer phones these days have a ringer setting, loud, soft, off. hehe