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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Do rotary phones even work anymore? I had thought (perhaps mistakenly) that support for them was dropped a number of years ago.

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I have a functioning rotary phone connected to POTS. I do live in the sticks though. Only issue is automated systems that ask me to dial 1 for foo, 2 for bar, etc. But a lot of those now actually also take voice.

You can play dtmf into the microphone with a separate device

Blue boxing is back baby!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

Shouldn’t that still work there if they work for dialling?

No, the dialing on a rotary phone is done by quickly closing and opening the circuit (this means you can tap out numbers by hand on the switch that detects you hanging up the handset).

Press 1 to continue systems require the DTMF tones to be played down the line, either by the phone or any other device held up to it.

I commented [0] on this a while back, there are hybrid adapters that bridge Bluetooth to old handsets. I have an older version of this [1] and a few different phones I've successfully used with it. YMMV

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37484671

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Xtreme-Technolgoies-XLink-Bluetooth-G...

I thought that too. Pulse dialing can’t possibly work anymore. Is OP sure it’s not a retrofit?

There are pulse to tone converters: https://www.dialgizmo.com

The VoIP gateways we were installing a few years ago still supported pulse dialing on the FXS lines. Those gateways supported all sorts of archaic and arcane POTS features. All the classic feature codes (like *69) had support. I think it could be set up to emulate a DMS-100 or a 5Ess as well.

If you have a copper landline from your local telephone company, I'm willing to bet it still supports pulse dialing? Maybe it's 50/50 now?

ha. this just reminded me that some old touchtone phones had a pulse button in case you needed it.

Every POTS phone I've ever seen, touchtone included, has a pulse button. It's the hook switch!

Yes, last year, I setup a real CenturyLink POTS line for my MIL in a condo near me, and tested my rotary phone on the line, and it works fine. That phone won't dial with my VoIP ATAs, even though they say they work with pulse dialing though.

I'm hoping it continues to work when utility power goes out, but we haven't had a long enough outage to test since I set it up.

There are adapters available.

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