My home has phone wiring (on the phone company side) that is state-of-the-art 1950's technology.
To be specific, I an receiving three conductors into a 305A box.

Now, Ive had the line from the box, into the house, cut / trashed any number of times. Accident, malice, animal action ... you name it. This spring I'm looking to re-route the line in a more sheltered path.

Now ... perhaps someone could save me a lot of 'hit and miss' and tell me which wire goes where?
The wire I'll use, and the jacks in the house, will be Panduit "Cat 5", since I carry those on the truck. (Think of the cable as '3 wires and 5 spares )

Which three of the four center wires goes to which screw on the 305A block?

Which three of the four center wires goes to which screw on the 305A block?

You are totally confused. You only use one pair. How could you possibly wire a jack with three wires?

I have never seen 3 conductor service wire- that coming in from the pole. Perhaps what you are talking about is what your house is wired with? Is this at the protector (didn't have NIDs or demarcs back then and I don't remember what a 305A looks like). If not that is where you want to start.

Do you own a butt set? The two conductors from the street are what you are interested in.

Oh, and throw those damn CAT5 jacks away. They are not for telephones only friggin' computers! Plug your computer into one by mistake and you'll wipe out your NIC on the first ring!

-Hal



[This message has been edited by hbiss (edited 03-04-2007).]

What I am callo\ing "305A" boxes are the final piece of equipment from the phone company. The only identification is the "305A" stamping in the cover. This design is, as I said, quite dated. The wires look to be #18- quite large by today's standards.

Oddly enough, the phone company assures me that they can provide me DSL over this Sputnik-era hardware. Hence the desire to be able to integrate this with the phone company.

The wire terminations are the type where you wrap the stripped wire around a screw, then tighten.

Looking at the connectors (at my end), they are identified with both "A" (AT&T) and "B" (TIA) color codes. The phone would use the middle four places.

Prior to my moving into this place, the existing phone jacks were the mid-60's style, consisting of a large plug having four large round pins, and a jack that accepted it. The previous tenant had trashed the place, cutting the wire in several places, etc.

I was able to 'jury rig' service using some Cat 5 connector and a jack ... but I figure it's past time I did things in a more professional manner. I suppose I can -once again- perform 'hit or miss' at the 305 block until something works .... but I'd much prefer something along the lines of 'the blue wire goes to the screw on the left' sort of thing.

I was just hoping someone here had the 'history' to recognize this equipment.

I would change the rj45 jack to a rj 11 style and use the blue pair for the drop from the phone to the demarc

I'm quite familiar with screw or binding post terminals, they are still used today. I believe a 305A is simply a couple of busses with a bunch of screws on them to allow the connection of four or five runs to one feed. It is one pair. Three wires are not used today. If your wiring is color coded, green and red is tip and ring respectively. That's your pair. The yellow was a ground and is no longer so you can forget about it.

But this really doesn't matter, you want to get rid of all that. You want to begin your new wiring at the protector located where the service enters the house. It's either outside or in the basement. That 305A is merely a junction box. Trace the feed back to where it comes from and/or follow the service wire to see where that goes.

I've seen protectors removed, buried behind the siding by the siding guys and since they were mounted to the floor joists in the basement buried when someone decides to finish the basement ceiling.

If you don't have or can't find your protector you need to have your TELCO replace the drop and install a protector which will now include a NID (network interface device). They will connect this to a proper ground (which should be your service ground) to protect your home and equipment. The NID will have either color coded screws or a lever type connection for you to run your wiring from.

Looking at the connectors (at my end), they are identified with both "A" (AT&T) and "B" (TIA) color codes. The phone would use the middle four places.

NO! Like I said, those are 8 pin network jacks. "A" and "B" designate 568A and 568B wiring methods neither of which are applicable here. You want to use 6 pin jacks that correspond to the plugs on your telephone line cords. Use the w/bl pair, w/bl is tip, bl/w is ring.

-Hal

Three wire is for selective ringing back when party lines were common. Most times you just connected the green and yellow together for single party service and went out of the Dmark red/green.

I think a 305A block is an old style protector. Is a metal box about 4" wide, 6" tall and 2" thick. Several style protectors were used, most common was a round knob style or some had the screw in type. There were 3 terminals on the bottom, Tip(green) Ring (red) and ground (yellow) The gn/rd/yl cable is known as station wire. It is no longer used and in not good to used modern phone systems. Newer cable is made up of twisted pairs. The twisting prevents crosstalk between pairs and also lowers the noise and interferance. (twisting the wire makes a poor antenna) Some station wire was made with 4 conductors, a black wire was added. this was for princess phones with a lighted dial. The power for the light was supplied from a transformer (wall wart style). The yellow wire was used on phone systems that used ground start. A momentary grounding of the tip wire caused the phone to go off hook. (I am not sure on how they all worked) Ground start systems I believe are no longer used in the USA. Ground is not used. If either Tip or Ring wire is grounded you will get 60 cycle hum on the phone. Some people will try to use the 4 conductor ststion wire for 2 lines, but you will most likely have crosstalk between phone lines, and it will cause DSL or data lines to run slow. Most newer phones do not care about polarity. You can hook the 2 wires either way. Older phones would not dial and some would not ring if you got the Tip and Ring wires reversed. Newer paired cable has 1st pair Wh/Bl (tip) Bl/WH (ring) 2nd pair Wh/Or (tip)Or/Wh (ring) 3rd Pr Wh/Gn (tip) Gn/Wh (ring) 4th pr Wh/Bn (tip) Bn/Wh (ring). If you use cat 5 cable (up to 4 lines per cable) you can follow the above color code. Robert

Ground start was usually used for a pay phone. When folks learned all they had to do was ground the line to get dial tone ma bell armored the handset cable, changed the design of the microphone so it was "pin proof" and glued on the caps.

OK, here is a brief historical bit:

305A is just a Bell System general purpose enclosure that was made out of stamped aluminium until the 1970's. It was drilled and tapped for mounting of a variety of protectors. The 305A only had room for one protector, either a 123A (one pair) or 128A (two pair).

The older drop wire that was mentined is standard 18.5 gauge standard parallel drop wire, which is perfectly suitable to support DSL. It consists ot two copper-coated steel wires laid in a parallel plastic or neoprene rubber jacket. It is similar in appearance to heavy-duty lamp cord.

The three conductor wiring was very common for station cable runs in the 1950's. The yellow conductor was used for a ground. If you were on a party line, the "A" party had their ringers connected between the ring conductor (red) and the yellow. The "B" party was connected between the tip conductor (green) and the yellow.

You won't see this, or the need for it anymore since party lines are long gone.

Oh, by the way, ground start trunks are still very heaviliy used in the US for PBX's. They won't be fading off into the sunset too soon.

[This message has been edited by EV607797 (edited 03-05-2007).]

Ahh, I knew Ed would remember what a 305A is. Suttle actually makes a 305A which is as I described and is not what you have.

-Hal

I once worked at a place that had a huge problem with "glare". That is, someone picking up an outside line would get connected to an incoming call on a regular basis.

At a company meeting I suggested that they order ground-start lines and change the modules on the Merlin to 408GS cards to fix the problem. GS=GROUND START. They had 408LS = LOOP START cards.

Unfortunately, all the "phone guy" heard was "order ground-start lines" and the part about changing the modules on the Merlin was totally missed.

So, for at least a day, nobody could make any outgoing calls.

I asked the "phone guy" what happened and he didn't want to "talk about it". I already knew what happened.

And that is the reason ground start lines are used.

-Hal

3-wire was also used for the "princess", and other phones with lights on them as well. Some had seperate transformers, some had the power from the CO.

The Princess and Trimline phones all used plug-in transformers and they had to use 4 conductors which was "quad" or "JK" wiring. The red and green were tip and ring, the black and yellow were 10VAC from the transformer.

I believe later on electroluminescent keypads were introduced that did away with the incandescent lamp and the need for a transformer. These used only the tip and ring deriving power from the CO battery voltage.

So no, the yellow was not used after party ringing was done away with as far as I know.

-Hal

renosteinke
All you have to do is find the talk pair at the dmarc with a butt set or phone. Then homerun each jack from that point. If using CAT5 use the Blue/Wht pair, and connect to the RED/GREEN on a RJ-11 jack

I appreciate all the advice ... this is on my 'weekend list.'

The yellow wire on old party line service also served a secondary purpose in some cases. As well as providing the bell ground for split ringing, on some exchanges the equipment would test the resistance to ground before completing a toll call in order to identify the calling party. The ringer coils on each phone were wired slightly differently for each party to allow this to work.

Here in the U.K. we had ground-start on our two-way party lines. Because all calls (local or otherwise) were metered, the exchange needed to determine which was the originating party in all cases, and provided two separate line circuits.

A simple relay set added to party lines then connected the line to one or the other normal line circuits depending upon which side of the line was grounded to start the call. Party line phones actually had a button on top which you had to press to get dialtone.

By the way, I was looking through BellSouth's website for something the other day, and it seems that somewhere within its territory there are still some 8-way party lines in use!

I don't know if I still have any of the old Automatic Electric ordering information around. As I remember there were a number of ringer options available when ordering phones. There was straight line (not frequency selective) and frequency selective that would ring at only certain ring frequencies. There were also those with taps as you talk about. Ed could probably remember what that system is called, I would have to look it up.

So with all those options you can see how they can do 8 subscriber party lines.

-Hal

Around here, there were three to five customers on a party line. Around 1980 they went to private lines.

For quite a while, a three wire cable fed the phone, and it is still in the wall, then along the basment works. All replaced with Cat3 cable.

Way back in the olden Ma Bell days the "phone man legend" scam was you could order 16 party service and be pretty sure you would still have the line to yourself since nobody else would order it. I am not sure anyone ever tried it tho. It was supposed to be an option in the tarrif.

As I understand the history, it was almost exclusively the independents which used frequency selective ringing (it makes sense, therefore, that Automatic Electric had these tuned ringers).

Ma Bell had a 4-way party line arrangement with fully selective ringing. Two parties had their ringers connected tip-to-ground, two were ring-to-ground, and they all had a cold-cathode tube in series. By applying a suitable positive or negative bias the equipment could selectively ring each of the four phones individually.

Then by using a combination of single and double rings the same basic arrangement could make an 8-way party line, no longer with fully selective ringing but each phone would only ring for its own calls and those of one other party.

Some small SxS offices had a 10-way party line system with coded ringing in which the last digit of the number determined the ring cadence and whether ringing voltage was applied to ring or tip. For example, 4931=long, 4932=short-short, 4933=long-short, and so on, then 4936 through 4930 repeated the same codes on the other side of the line. People on a single-line would always have a number ending in 1.

We had distinctive ringing on an ISDN derived line, but not quite the same thing

MSN 1 - Short-short (UK/IRL standard ring)
MSN 2 - Long (European Style)
MSN 3 - short-short-short

The only time I heard distinctive ringing on an analogue line here thesedays is if you accidently hang up on a call that's on hold (i.e. during call waiting / if you press R)

You'll get short-short-short-short

Same ring applied if you set ringback when free. (camp on busy)
and RINGBACK + number will display on the CLID.

Another use for the 3rd (yellow) wire that I have come across is to power the little incandescent lamp that illuminated the dial on really old "princess" rotary dial phones.

The Telco provided a "wall wart" type transformer to feed the voltage (8 VAC?) over the yellow wire.

We just discussed that above.

-Hal

OOPS! Missed that...

If you hang up while there's a call on hold here you just get the normal double-ring (0.4 sec. on, 0.2 off, 0.4 on, 2.0 off).

We have a distinctive-ring service which provides a second number on the same line with single-burst ringing (1 sec. on, 2 secs. off). Unlike the old Bell CDO above though, the caller still hears the regular double-burst ringback.

Apparently those old Bell System CDOs would allow you to dial any of the numbers associated with a specific line, even if it was only single-party service. So if someone on a private line had 4931, so could still reach him with 4932, 4933 etc. and get the different cadences.

Multiple distinctive ringing undocumented and for free!

You all have been most helpful. While a bit late in the game, I thought I'd post a pic of the block. There are two in the pic; I opened the one on the left so you could see the insides.

Yup, just as ED said. That's a carbon protector, not a block. Those two 7/16 nuts on the left and right are the T&R phone line. The middle one is a ground for the protector. That should be a #14 from it to the electrical ground. Any other wires on that ground binding post- cut them off (unless its another #14 to the other protector, but I don't see that.)

If you are courious unscrew one of the carbons (the 1/2" hex caps above the line binding posts) and see what they look like (don't lose the parts). They will short occasionally and need to be replaced by the TELCO.

Looks like you have two lines there and its pretty messy and old. Really wish you would take my advice and have the TELCO replace those with todays version. Better protection, less problems and easier for you to connect to.

-Hal

Reno!! Get away from my asbestos-sided house!

I am not sure about everywhere but United Telephone <RIP> had a gas protector element that was a screw in replacement for the carbons on that Dmark.
They were running around SW Florida swapping them out in the 80s. In true TELCO fashion the carbons were usually left where they fell.

Yes there are many manufacturers of these protector modules and they are all interchangable. The gas tube versions always have the screw cap painted white.

Aw, United is still around, it's just now Sprint, I mean Embarq, I mean.......

I am "barqing" as we speak.
I kicked the Comcast cable modem to the curb.
UTS actually ended up building a pretty good "data" department. I worked with them a lot in the 80s. UTS also held the price on a pay phone to a dime way up into the 80s. For a non-bell company they really did a very good job. Sprint did not carry on that tradition. They ended up uning contractors for most of their service and that was pretty spotty. Some guys were OK, others were slugs.

Here's an old G.P.O. document showing the protection which used to be employed on British telephone lines, both at the subs premises and at the exchange:

https://www.electrical-contractor.net/PC/TelLineProtection.pdf

I am with you, Greg. The last of the true independents that did a really good job.