On 07/06/2016 12:29 PM, mike wrote:

Neighbor had a similar problem.
Turned out to be a busted ground wire half a mile away.
The local ground connection was enough to make the audio
work, but the broken wire made the other stuff fail.

Hello, and interesting. By "ground" do you mean earthed? In the olden
all-analog days IIRC the only connection to earth on a 2 wire phone line
was at the CO where the positive terminal of the 48 volt common battery
was solidly connected to earth. (I'm not including party-line
ringing-to-ground configurations that are decades obsolete.) Sincerely,

--
J. B. Wood e-mail: