Mark,

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:55:51 -0500, Mark E. Skeels wrote:

> Can you guys think of any way a phone line could be induced to go off 
> hook via a stimulus external to the phone line (not electrically connected?

An earthquake shaking the handset off the cradle... a rat gnawing through the insulation...  water in a junction box... a nail through the cable... (I 
suppose that's electrically connected, strictly speaking)...

Has anyone checked the cellar to see if there's someone trapped down there, who is trying to signal their plight?

I think following the cable would be a good plan, to see if there's something obvious causing it.  Then again, to see if it's something that isn't obvious! 
:-)

Incidentally, you mentioned interference at the right frequency to dial - that would be 10Hz, rather unlikely to find something that slow, especially if 
it's in a non-regular pattern like 9-1-1.  Incidentally, in the UK the emergency number is 999, and one reason it wasn't 111 was because cables 
swinging about in the breeze could easily short out in that pattern - when they were bare wires, of course.  The European standard is 112, and that 
works in the UK as well.

Has anyone looked at the call records for the line, to see if there is anything else strange happening?  If there's some random-number generator at 
work (cables moving and causing intermittent shorts) you may find all sorts of random numbers, and 911 just comes up statistically once in a while.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist