Modem won't work (hardware issue)

[Felix]

Hi there,

I've got a generic rockwell V.90 modem from the UK. In control panel, modem section, everything looks fine. It's just - if you start dialling, the modem clicks, waits, ... and clicks again. Then all you'll get is the box "there is no dialtone. check your cabling."

I've checked the cabling. I found out that the RJ11 jack soldered to the modem made some problems in the past. So I unsoldered it and soldered the 4-wire cable directly to the modem board.

Unfortunately with no result... :( The cable itself is good. I have a tension of 45V on one pair of the 4-wire cable. Standard (US) pin assignment would be that the 45V must be on the inner pair at the RJ11 jack, respectively on the soldering eyes on the modem board. This setup gave no result, thus I changed the assignment so that the 45V was on the outer pair. With no result either.

My last idea is, maybe the british pin assignment is something different than standard? (consider they drive also on the left side of the road... :D ) If this is the case, how is the british pin assignment (i.e. which pair carries the signal)?

If the same standard pin assignment is used in the UK as in the rest of the world, what else could it be? Again, this modem gave some problems in the past but for windows, all and everything seems ok. *sigh*

Any help is highly appreciated. TIA

Felix

[reboot]

If it's from the UK, and you're using it anywhere else, you must get the driver version for the country you are in.
If it's from anywhere else, and you're using it in the UK, you must get a UK driver for it. The tone signal/line voltage is completely different, and the modem just won't initialize correctly without the correct incoming signal from the phone line.

[Felix]

Thanks for the reply, reboot. Before I started soldering I was on your modem driver page (great page! :) Thank you) and I learned that I can load any rockwell compatible driver to a compatible modem. Since I'm sitting in switzereland and I'm using a swiss rockwell V.90 external modem and the UK modem is also a rockwell V.90 external one, I loaded the swiss firmware to the UK modem. The firmware upgrade worked well and the modem was read from windows correctly. I'm now not at home where the modem is (thus I cannot copy the ATI3 string) but the firmware version is now 2.100, which works perfectly with my swiss modem.

So here we are:
- UK modem, rockwell 56k+voice+fax
- swiss v.90 firmware
- modem cable soldered to the modem board
------------------------------------
no dialtone. :mad:

BTW if the modem "picks up the phone" (the first click) there IS no dialtone in the modem speaker. Volume is set to something greater than 0, so I think that I should hear the dialtone in the modem speaker if there would be one, right? If the modem reads the dialtone is another story (the driver story), and that's why I already loaded the swiss firmware.

What did I forget? :rolleyes:

[reboot]

Either a wire gone bad, or...
I'm still trying to get my brain around this one.
You are using Swiss firmware on a UK modem in Switzerland, right so far?
Are you also using the Swiss driver for the modem?

[Felix]

No, there was the generic (UK) driver used within windows. I felt that this won't be the problem. Anyway, just to be sure, I loaded the swiss driver into windows (installed the swiss modem), but with no result either. And as another try I installed a standard 28.8 modem, with no result either. Then I changed again the wiring so that the signal is now on the outer pair (which worked before the modem was mine), but with no result either. :(

Sounds like some hardware error, isn't it? This beast teases me!! I've had it almost done!! :mad:

I think I'll give up. :rolleyes: Will go and get a second hand modem for some $30