# Problem with landline phone



## HareBrain (Sep 3, 2020)

I've recently had a weird problem develop with my landline phone (which has one handset and a base unit).

If I make an outgoing call, the recipient can't hear me, but I can hear them. If I get an incoming call, everything's fine.

It's not easy in the current circs to borrow someone else's landline to plug into my socket, so has anyone any idea what the issue might be, before I buy a new one? I'm assuming the problem can't be the line itself as incoming calls are fine. But it can't be e.g. the mic, as that works with incoming calls too. Broadband is OK. Any ideas?


----------



## nixie (Sep 3, 2020)

What type of master socket do you have ?


----------



## HareBrain (Sep 3, 2020)

Single or double, you mean? It's single.


----------



## nixie (Sep 3, 2020)

Have you tried the phone directly into socket without the ADSL filter?
Could be filter needs changing.


----------



## HareBrain (Sep 3, 2020)

Ah, thanks Nixie -- I should have thought of trying that.

In fact swapping it in and out seems to have fixed it, so I guess something had just got loose, despite not having been touched in years. It seems weird though that the problem only manifested on outgoing calls.


----------



## nixie (Sep 3, 2020)

No problem


----------



## Parson (Sep 4, 2020)

Well, good, glad that's settled. FYI I once had a similar problem and it turned out to be the battery in the phone.


----------



## TheEndIsNigh (Sep 4, 2020)

You can always have them (Whoever the company is) test the line via 150 or whatever your supplier uses for engineering faults.

Some even have an automatic check.

As a general rule though this kind of fault is usually caused by the security services taking an interest in your private affairs.

Maybe you subscribe to one of those radical sites that discuss science fiction matters.

You know the type. They are often associated with writers of stories where supposedly futuristic, and to some, fantastical ideas are bandied about.

It's all clever stuff, but if you remember the BBC during the world war sending out random messages to "loved" ones which were in fact instructions to the resistance to blow up a train or meet a parachute in the early hours of the morning in some field way past the back of beyond, you'll get the idea.

I understand these sites sometime run writing competitions where what appears to be an entry is actually secret instructions.

Take for example the following title which is a random sample I found recently just be browsing the net in general.

*Where the tortoise and the hare have a race to see who is faster in which the hare wins, but sadly due to a lack of speed, the tortoise gets eaten by a jaguar.* 

The implications are easily interpreted.

Tortoise (an obvious code name for some target) is to be done away with by agent Jaguar during some sporting event.


----------

