sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems Merlin Legend

i have been searching for a new PBX to connect my rotary phone collection to, and I was looking at the Panasonic 616, bur the main thing with that is, that it is not very expansible. I was looking at getting another Merlin, but in one of the more larger models so I can have room for my collection to grow... Does this make any sense? my main question is does the Merlin legend support rotary dialing???

The Merlin Legend and Magix will both support rotary dial telephones. Depending upon how many phones the collection contains, also worth considering is the Partner ACS.

If you go with a Legend, be sure the processor is at R7 so that you can "rotary enable" the Tip/Ring ports, and be sure you also have some modules that supply TTR's so that they can dial out over TT trunks.

008-OPT cards will give you more ringing voltage/current, which may be needed for the older ringers.

So far, I've only run into one ringer that my Legend's 016 Basic card can't ring, and it's a funky "frequency" ringer in a wood wall phone from an old party line system, so it's not even supposed to ring on a regular line.

I don't know the specs offhand, but you need to keep an eye on power consumption. It may be physically possible to put four 016 Basics in a carrier, but the power supply may not be able to accommodate a 64 REN load.

The phones may not work well with the ringing cadence that the Legend is sending. The Legend & Magix have a few options to compensate for that.

When connecting a Bogen TPU100 to a 016 T/R card in a Merlin Magix, I configured the chosen port on the 016 card as a fax extension. By doing that, the Magix now sends a traditional ringing signal to the Bogen rather than a cadence ring.

I have better than a dozen old phones, mostly 500 sets but some 2500 sets and a few oddball Stromberg-Carlson multi-line sets on my ACS and it works perfectly. Most of them I had to move the bias spring to the low-bias position to make them ring, because the ring voltage is lower then a traditional POTS line, but with something like 15-16 REN I don't have any issues. And the ACS has a pulse to tone converter built in. My Comcast voice modem doesn't support pulse dialing, but with the ACS I can dial out with no problem from my rotary sets.

I'm just glad to see I'm not the only person around here using a Merlin as an elaborate means to use old phones on VOIP lines.

Quick update, I purchased a Merlin Magix off eBay. My question now is, is there a way to restore the system back to factory defaults without using the admin port? If I have to, do I need to use a 355af adapter or can I just use a null console cable?

PM sent

@Steve: That makes two of us! lol!!

I have a Merlin Legend with an 016 and it rings 500/2500 sets just fine. It also converts the rotary dialing to touch tone when I place a PSTN call, which is nice. You can customize the extension dialplan by putting it in Set Up Space mode, which gives it more "phone" character because the extensions are four digits versus two. It's been my favorite system to try yet, since it allows for quite a few different varieties of phones. The Partner phones, the ATL Merlin sets, single line sets, and of course the standard MLX phones.

PM me if you ever run into any difficulty setting up.

It's pretty straightforward.