William W. Plummer wrote:
Steph in PA wrote:

Hi, I have two problems:

1) I bought one of those telephone line testers made by GB Instruments
for $5. I plugged it in, and it came out as "red", which means
"reversed line". What does this mean?

I checked at the NID (the part inside the house), and only a red and
green line are connected there, with the yellow and black not
connected and being wrapped around the green and red; but my phone
works fine.

BTW, I'm furious that the yellow and black wires are not connected,
since I am getting a second phone line in the next few months. Why
would someone install the phone line this way? Is this normally how
the pros do it?

2) My other telephone jack in the house is testing as "dead", since no
light lights up on the tester. I checked at the NID in the house
again, and the red and green wires are connected there. I traced the
line about half way, in the basement, and it appeared to be ok. The
other half was inaccessible, since the landlord has about 1-2 feet of
books, newspapers, magazines, etc. piled on the entire floor, which is
blocking my access to the part of the basement where the line runs.

Does anyone know why my phone jack is reading dead? I haven't check
the actual jack yet.


Black and Yellow are to be used for a second line. You can purchase
line splitters.

Polarity reversal is how the determine whether you have a pulse dialing
system or a tone dialing.
Wrong! You can pulse dial or touch tone on any
line. The receiver in the central office
takes either. The telephone central office can,
via software, not allow touch tones for those
who don't pay the extra fee although I think
today, it's mostly included. But, if you can
touch tone dial on a line, you most certainly can
dial pulse. Dial pulsing simply opens the
loop a number of times as the dial returns (9
pulses for a number 9, etc.). Most modern
telephone sets can work with the polarity reversed
on a single party line. Older sets will
work (it will ring, you can talk), but the touch
tone dial won't put out tones when you press
a button.