BTS: FaxFix!

Read me first: You might remember last month I mentioned our real copper wire (POTS = Plain Old Telephone System) fax line had a ground short which was causing faxes to fail due to the buzz on the line. I had been told by AT&T it would be fixed that week, but apparently someone forgot to tell the special engineers so the case just sat in limbo. They have an A-Team who deal with these real copper wire landlines, as most service techs only know the newer ADSL style phone systems that plug into a modem (and thus can't be used if the power goes out, which is a good reason to keep a POTS).

This led to me swapping out the Samsung SF2500 (my teenage machine I spent months trying to find then repair in that special video) with a slightly newer Samsung SF model that I bought back then as a backup. The reason for this was the old one, being one of Samsung's first, did not have ECM error correction, and thus could not overcome the buzzing on the line. The "new" one did, and worked fine! Here's the new one in situ.

It looks about the same, just more compact and slim, with no paper cutter at the back (leading to lots of torn off and accidentally torn pages!).

Well, they finally came back after 3 months, and impressively traced the issue to my neighbour's front garden. Or as she would say, 'neighbor's front yard'. I don't know how they detected the exact spot, but they marked it on the ground between two trees with a little flag ⛳️

As shown in the video above, there's a splice connection which had finally worn through and failed after about 45 years, so they dug a hole, fished it out, and replaced it. Then my neighbour fell into the hole and died.

That's fax. Just kidding. The line is now good as new and the buzz is gone! I was worried I'd have to "upgrade" to a modem phone line, but copper wire has prevailed - woo! I told them I'd call them back in 45 years to replace it again.

Fax the studio at +1 747 PERIFAX (7374329)

Your friend in retro, Perifractic