Lab – Telephone AC

Characteristics
Intro
In this lab, we are going to set up a circuit that will allow us to use two
phones as an intercom system. You could do this at home and use your existing
wiring to make this circuit if you wanted to.
You’ll be looking at the characteristics of the circuit under various situations
like talking and whistling in to the phone, pressing the buttons, etc.

Materials
Per group of two

– two telephones
– two telephone jacks
– parts kit

Set up

680 Ω 12 V
TP Ring TP Tip

Tip Ring

1. Set up the circuit above. Basically you have made a crossover cable so that
two phones can communicate with each other. If you did this at home, you
could use a car battery and it would work fine. More on this later.
2. Now that the circuit is setup, pick up one of the phones. Tell your partner to
pick up the other one. Test if you can hear each other.
3. Connect the oscilloscope across the ring and tip wires. Adjust the horizontal
and vertical scale on the oscilloscope until you see a sine wave when you
whistle into the receiver.
 4. You are seeing is a time varying voltage on the line. Recall: As you make
noise, the mic’s resistance changes at the same rate as the sound waves.
This makes the voltage change at the same rate because of ohm’s law.
5. Whistle into the phone and hit run/stop on the oscilloscope. What is the
approximate period of the sine wave? Calculate the frequency of the sine
wave?
6. Try whistling at a different pitch. What is the approximate period of this sine
wave? Calculate the frequency of the sine wave?
7. Try whistling louder. What is the difference?
8. Press a button on the telephone. What do you observe? Why?

At home, try this at your own risk:

If you wanted to use house’s wiring to make this kind of intercom, you could
cut the phone’s cord open and swap the red wire with the black and the green with
the yellow for two phones so that the tip and ring were yellow and black,
respectively. A lot of the time, the black and yellow wire are not used by Bell.
Then, add the 12V battery and resistor in series with ONE of the phones, plug
them both in anywhere in the house and you should be able to communicate from
anywhere in the house to anywhere else. NOTE: If you do this, make sure that the
black and yellow wires are connected to any of Bell’s equipment or you could cause
some problems!