mourning analog » analog communication

What kinds of telephone stations can I add to a business phone system?

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:25:25 +0000

Digital Telephone Stations

The most common telephone stations in use on business telephone systems are digital. Some examples of pure digital systems include Norstar phone systems, Avaya Merlin Legend and Merlin Magix, and Avaya Definity systems. Digital phone systems sample your voice using a method called Time Division Multiplexing or TDM. When you speak into a digital telephone, your voice is digitally sampled into time slots so that a conversation doesn’t have to use the entire bandwidth of a circuit. The system then uses a clock to synchronize the digital samples and turn them back in to voice. That sounds complicated. It is, and you don’t need to know what it means. Whereas analog telephone stations can only handle one conversation at a time, digital phone stations can stuff more than one conversation and other features onto a single pair of wire. This provides for more features, less wiring, and more efficient communication than a simple analog circuit.

When shopping for a digital telephone system, you may encounter a variety of acronyms describing the names of each manufacturers digital protocols.

Avaya Phone Systems – DCP – Digital Communications Protocol, MLX – Multi Line Digital, TDL – I do not remember what this one stands for.

Norstar Phone Systems – TCM – Time Compression Multiplex

Toshiba Phone Systems – DKT – I do not remember what this one stands for.

Analog Telephone Stations

An analog telephone station uses no digital sampling to compress your voice and conserve bandwidth. When you use an analog telephone the sound waves of your voice are converted into electrical waves by a microphone and conducted down copper wire. The telephone of the person you call then uses those electrical signals to vibrate a speaker in their phone’s handset. The speaker then moves air and produces sound waves that can be heard. When you use an analog phone and connect to another phone, you seize the entire circuit. No one else can use that circuit while you are conversing. The same is true for analog telephone stations connected to a business phone system. They can only handle one conversation at a time.

There really aren’t any completely analog business telephone systems manufactured anymore. The AT&T Merlin phone systems were probably the most popular analog phone systems ever produced. The majority of these were installed in the 1980’s. There are still many of them still in service today. Merlin phone systems used an ATL (analog telephone line) standard of 4-pair (8 wires) copper wiring that connected the Merlin control unit to each telephone.Today’s digital systems only use a single pair wiring scheme that can handle much more voice and signaling information over less wiring.

Well, then what are analog telephone stations good for? Today’s digital phone systems can all handle analog stations. Analog phone stations are usually seen in common areas like a warehouse, lobby, or lunch room. Fax machines and modems are also forms of analog phone stations. One of the most powerful uses of the analog phone station is the conference room speakerphone. You may have already used some of these futuristic-looking triangular speakerphones. The most common is the SoundStation series by Polycom.

Voice over IP Telephone Stations

VoIP phone systems are creating all the buzz. Most manufactured phone systems today boast VoIP capabilities and can handle IP phone stations. By converting voice into data packets, these phone systems can send voice conversations over a business’ data network. No more need for separate wiring in the wall. One set of wiring can handle the data network and voice network.

Conceptually, this is great from a physical wiring and management perspective. There is less investment in wiring and conceivably one person/department can manage both the phone system and computer network. The telephone system after all becomes just another application on the data network.

The most important application provided by today’s VoIP capable systems is telecommuting. An employee no longer needs to be in the office to use the phone system. VoIP phones can connect to the home office phone system via VPN (virtual private network) over the the public Internet. The employee can make and receive calls as if he were in the office.

So, what kind of telephone stations should I add to my phone system?

If you end up purchasing a currently manufactured system, then it will be either digital or digital and VoIP.

Digital Phone System – If you purchase a solely digital phone system then you will add digital phone stations and probably some analog ones in the situations we described above.

Digital and VoIP Capable System – If you purchase a system that handles digital and VoIP, then there are some choices to be made.

Situation 1 – Your office space already has existing phone wiring from a previous phone system. Choose digital stations. Digital telephone stations have somewhat better sound quality than VoIP. You may also save money because VoIP phones often require additional hardware and/or licensing. Situation 2 – You are wiring a new office space with one set of wiring or your existing office space only has one set of wiring for the data network. Choose IP stations. IP telephones can share the wiring for the data network. Most IP phones have built-in 2-port switches so that each phone can be connected to a co-located PC for the employee’s work station.

Looking For A Digital Radio Scanner?

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 11:15:16 +0000

The first step in researching digital radio scanners is to learn the basics. Digital radio scanners are designed to receive and process digitally encoded signals transmitted between various two-way radio systems in public use. The use of digital signals, unlike the recent mandated changeover of television to digital, is voluntary. Both older analog signals and newer digital transmissions are in use. All currently available scanners still receive the analog signals.

You will probably encounter the term “APCO P-25″ as you look at digital radio scanners. This is the formal specification for the unencrypted digital format all digital radio scanners support. There are encrypted transmissions that no scanner can process. Since 1994 all scanners have been “Cellular frequency Deleted (Blocked)” by law. This means they cannot intercept cell phone messages and cannot be modified to do so.

Buying, owning and using digital radio scanners is completely legal under federal regulations. There is a clause in the regulations about using a scanner to “break an existing law”. Some states and localities have enacted restrictions on using scanners in automobiles or while committing crimes. It is a good idea to check local rules and seek real legal advice about any questions.

There are many publicly available transmissions. Police and fire departments, some ham radio signals, news media vans and helicopters, sports officials, and racing team communications are just a few. Auto racing fans often use digital radio scanners to listen in on team communications.

Taking some time to understand the features will help you avoid paying for things you will never use. The many available brands and models of digital radio scanners offer a wide range of available features and prices. Personal research will pay off with a scanner you will be happy with.

A couple other terms you will encounter are PL and DPL. Some digital radio frequencies are shared by two or more departments. Each department’s transmissions begin with a PL tone that specifies the department. Digital radio scanners with the feature can be set to ignore or accept transmissions from specified departments.

The added dangers of online shopping are well known. The retailer you buy from should offer several payment options, have a real physical store address, offer new – not refurbished – products with full USA warranty and not have outrageous hidden shipping charges.

Tips to Clean Your Washing Machine

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:13:46 +0000

Washing machines are the new devices used for the advanced technology implementation in this new age. This age is the age of sophisticated, advanced and digital technology that has done a lot to implement a lot of advantage over analog communication technology that not just make a turnover of the earlier systems but also added a lot of features that could be enabled by this new technology invented and used in the last couple of ages. Washer machine is one type of electronic material that is used now and here we are using it in our houses.

The things that are used in the houses have a lot of things especially of electronic goods and washer machine is one of them. Washer machines do a lot of work in case of washing clothes in our home. If we have a lot of dirty clothes then pouring some detergent powder in this appliance where there is some water poured in the device first and then we fell our clothes in the device and closing the door of this machine we can clean the clothes as well as dry up the clothes desired clothes to be made perfect and then we get our ultimate confidence on the machine.

The machine has a lot of things that should be taken care of and here we have a washing cycle embedded inside the machine and also there is a filter that filters out the dirty things inside the device. If some dirt gets consumed by the filter in the washer machine then we can have a lot of work to do as the important task is to clean the dirt from the outer shell of the filter by soft towel and then we can have our system performance effective. The system works very perfectly and then we can do a lot of work every day regarding cleaning of our clothes and we have our system work with maximum flexibility. The cycle circulates the water in the machine very perfectly and the water that is mixed with the detergent powder moves with a high speed and then we can make our clothes move with high speed and get washed. But after a lot of wash some amount of water can get consumed inside the machine that causes a lot of problem there.

So we have to wash our machine very frequently as then we can get our machine all right. After a lot of wash a lot of dirty things mixed with detergent solution may get preserved inside it and there we have to clean it every day for better result. High quality dishwashers are used in very house in the western countries and as the washing gets mandatory every day so washing of the internal structure of the house made washing machine also has got mandatory. Now we are not bothered to clean it as we can have a lot of things get well washed there.

When the clothes get dirtier then we have to wash it for more time as the amount of dirty things to remove requires a lot of time and there lies a huge disadvantage in case of power bills as we have to spend a lot of power and this is the great disadvantage. So we should not something more dirty as the cycle and the filter strength will get reduced in result to that and we see our machine performance gets well reduced exponentially.