[TriLUG] Re: Phone to use with PC

[Lee Fickenscher]

I'm pretty sure all you need is a dialer, especially if you already have 
it working under windows. Perhaps something like this:

http://wxdialer.sourceforge.net/index.html

-Lee

Scott G. Hall wrote:
> sjackson at radarfind.com wrote:
> 
>> Easiest way I know is to use a Nortel/Aastra Meridian 9617 USB phone. 
>> Plugs right in to the PC's USB port, and either the phone or the computer
>> has full control over the comings and goings.
> 
> 
> I don't want a phone handset!!  Quite the contrary, I want to use the same
> headphones I listen to music from the PC as my earpieces, and the 
> microphone
> over the monitor as the mouthpiece.  In ham-radio, this is called a "phone
> patch".  In the broadcast industry, it is called a telephone hybrid (based
> on the use of hybrid transformers), such as those used for talk-radio 
> shows.
> 
> On a standard telephone POTS line, there are several signals on it at the
> same time: the incoming audio, the outgoing audio, a high-voltage ring
> signal, and a DC voltage used to power handsets.  After blocking the DC
> voltage, and shunting the ring voltage, a hybrid transformer set separates
> the incoming from the outgoing audio (they are blended or "mixed" 
> together).
> 
> A standard modem already has the circuitry to "hybrid" the signal, and 
> DSP's
> to generate DTMF and modem negotiating tones, to receive and understand
> DTMF and modem neg. tones, and to separate the various narrow frequency
> bands that make up the communications channels in both directions used to
> pass digital information.
> 
> A lot of these same modems' DSP's also are capable of the wide spectrum
> (relatively) bidirectional streaming of regular audio.  Evidently my modem
> is one of these, as the manufacturer included software that utilizes it
> to act as an audio in-and-out device.
> 
> Since my modem is not unusual, and since there are several pieces of
> software in the MS-Windows world that do this function and work with my
> modem, and knowing that advanced state of Linux today, I thought for sure
> that there was software in Linux to do it as well.
> 
> I am unsure if my modem is one of those "winmodems" that uses the host's
> CPU to act as a DSP to process the signals.  If so, the likelihood of
> software to do this in Linux may even be more readily available.  My other
> box is running a winmodem and works just fine with my Debian-based 2.6
> kernel as a regular modem.
> 
> -- 
> Scott G. Hall
> Raleigh, NC, USA
> ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net