Stan S's Touchtone Tuning Fork!

[DavePEI]

I have made a number of suggestions here regarding different ways of doing things, and modern equipment to perform old tasks.

Have you ever had an older Touch Tone dial which is unreliable or won't break dial tone?  Don't forget many of the TT dials on collectable phones are nearing 50 years old. Most often the reason is that due to age and component changes, it no longer is generating the correct tones. But, how do you set them back to factory specs?

Stan Schreier has come up with a device he calls a "Electronic Touch Tone Tuning Fork". It is an electronic device designed to generate the 1209 and 697 hz. tones associated with the number 1 on the pad.

Stan's Tuning Fork is a precision Digital oscillator which provides the tones necessary to correctly tune a TT dial.

Using the proper tuning tool (supplied) you adjust the core of the pot core associated with the tone group you are tuning, high or low, until the beat frequency disappears, similar to using a BFO on a radio.

The kit provides:

1- The Tuning Fork
2- Instructional CD
3- One set of metal tuning tools; Square, Triangle, Hexagonal, and Straight Blade.
4- One set of double-sided plastic tuning tools; Square, Triangle, Hexagonal, and  Straight Blade.
5- Ten strips of burnishing paper
6- Four clip leads.
7- Carrying case.

How it is used is simpler than it seems, especially if you follow the videos he posts with his auctions and that are included on the instructional Cd. You need his kit, of course the phone under test, and a very handy thing is to have a speakerphone similar to my Radio Shack Duophone 43-278 speaker to monitor the tones, eliminating the need to balance the handset on your shoulder as you try to re-tune the dial. You need a means to dial the phone under test, be it another line, a Panasonic PBX, separate cell line, or a line simulator.

Plug the speaker into the Tuning Fork, and the phone into the speaker (procedure may vary with the design of the speaker you use). Plug the Tuning Fork into the phone line.

With the tuning fork turned off, you dial the phone from another line, pick it up, turn on the fork, then monitor the tones in the speaker. The keys associated with the frequency pair are depressed, then the pad inductors are tuned to zero beat against the tones generated by his device.

The frequency of the tone produced by the Tuning Fork is set by the position of the 'GROUP' switch. There is also a switch to reverse polarity of the line when needed.

The low group tone (697 Hz) is labeled 1+2.

The high group tone (1207 Hz) is labeled 1+4.

1+2 or 1+4 refer to the numbers you will have to simultaneously push on the keypad, so the frequency generated by the Touch Tone phone will match the frequency generated by the Tuning Fork.

The kit provides the appropriate tuning wands for the cores as well. These wands alone can be very hard to find without the kit.

Once these two tones are zero beat with the device, the pad will again meet original specifications, and again dial correctly, breaking dial tone.

This is just a basic overview of its operation. Stan provides a full run-down on the process in his Ebay listing and on the CD included with the device, including videos showing it being used with WE, NE, AE, and ITT dials.

These are available from Stan on Ebay. Stan's Ebay handle is: gray-western.

As with Stan's other projects of the past, it fills a gap in available equipment for the task. I have always admired Stan's products, and through the years, as have others, he has produced many unique devices.

If you have only one dial to re-tune, it is cheaper to send it away to have it done, but if you have more than one, or if you expect to have others, or if you are a seller and want to ascertain your dials will work on every line (including modern equipment which requires very precise tones), purchase is a truly viable option.

I wanted to post this last week, and have posted about this kit on CRPF in the past, but as I had an open bid on one of these on Ebay, didn't want to drive the price up. Now mine is on the way, time to let you all in on the device.

P.S. I don't get anything for recommending these. They are a remarkable and very useful device, which everyone should know about.

[Jim Stettler]

That has been on my list every since Stan brought it out. The biggest reason that it is needed is that the phone carriers have tightened up the freq. specs. When the TT dial was introduced the CO equipment had a wider range of tolerance. If your dial is properly tuned then it doesn't matter how tight the freq. spec is because your touchpad is precision tuned.
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A few years ago I bought 1 of  Stan's payphone controller ( the current model). It is a very nicely constructed. I realized when i was playing  with it,  that it works great as a test tool to determine where the problems with your payphone are.


JMO,
Jim S.

[DavePEI]

Stan tells me he will be posting another one later today: http://www.ebay.ca/sch/gray-western/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=