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> I am going to Frankfurt next week, and hope to be able to
> dial in with (old!) Mwave software. But Radio Shack had no
> special plug available (they said that their plug kit was a
> new item not available for another two weeks). What do I need,
> and how do I get it (or make it!)
You can get the physical adaptor to go from modular to the German
plug at any decent electronics store there. However at least *some*
of the available adaptors invert the pair combinations wrt North
American devices, ie black/yellow active instead of red/green, so if
you're not getting dialtone, this may be the problem. At this
point get out your pocket knife!
Myself, if I'm not sure about telecom standards at my destination,
I bring a small hardware hacking kit consisting of alligator clips,
electrical tape, a couple modular male-to-female adaptors, and
scavenged bits of 4-conductor cabling with male modular plugs on one
or both ends. That gives you a fair degree of flexibility in
adapting to the quirks of the local system. Frequently I will
dismantle the jack box so I can attach directly to loop. Although
naturally any attempt to attach a non-approved device to a
Continental phone network would be considered illegal if not
particularly immoral.
Two other things, call progress tones in many parts of Europe lack
the precision of those from North American switches, so you may have
to tell the modem to skip the dialtone check with, I believe, an
ATXn. Second, lots of German lines are configured to send "toll
pulses" (Gebuehrenimpulse) to the set, typically to click a
mechanical counter as billing units go by. These pulses consist of
short 14kHz tones at a whopping 10+ RMS Volts, a good order of
magnitude stronger than your modem squawk. Most Continental modems
have a low-pass filter built-in to take care of this, but North
American modems will drop connections like crazy on a line like
this. Not much you can do except construct your own filter or find
another line that doesn't have Gebuehrenimpulse enabled. Then again
maybe the MWave firmware is "global" in the sense that
low-pass-filtering is there already ... I don't have one, so I can't
check.
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Tim Vetter vfr@stm537.ubszh.net.ch (MIME, NEXTMAIL)
tim.vetter@ubs.com (ASCII, alternate)
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Forex & Fixed Income Trading Development
Union Bank of Switzerland
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