I talked to Seth on this and the Viking E50 has one pair that goes a Viking C1000 and then to the CICS built in ATA port that rings down to station 21.

The problem is that when the receptionist presses "**" to close the relay on the Viking C1000, only one "*" comes through and the relay does not open.

Another dealer with a MICS has tried using a stand alone ATA as a ring down to 21 and the tones pass fine when calling another station so it may be an issue with the CICS (at least R7.0 if not 7.1) built in ATA only letting one digit go out for some reason.

There is another solution using the E50 to a Viking RC2A to the ATA ringdown and only one digit needs to be heard.

The very messy part of all this is that Seth did a fine job of installation and the building will only let the security lock person install the E50 door box, nothing else, and no one else but them is allowed to install the door box.

The security lock people are not Nortel trained techs and have so far lost their shirts on this while Seth has made two trips over trying to make the customer whole by getting the ring down programming to work.

I'm not sure why a VMI would be needed as a stand alone ATA (admittedly on a MICS in a different city) passes all the tones from a digital keyset to a single line phone on the other end.

All would be solved if Viking's C1000 needed only one digit or if the CICS internal ATA passed more than one digit. The receptionist can get the call and press "*" as many times as she wants, but only one "*" can be heard on a buttset connected to the line out of the internal ATA.

Of course they have no spare CO positions and it would mean trading in an almost new CICS cabinet for a MICS cabinet, an expansion card, a 12x0 and another CO card.

The other solution of ringing it to a single line phone was turned down because they didn't want two phones on the receptionist's desk. That would have been a very cheap solution. But these are lawyers so they want everything their way. I only hope the final solution is a very high price.

THE Bracha, old blond specialist in Rube Goldberg solutions.