sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Security, Alarms and Paging Paging Chirping Bird or tea kettle

A paging system in a large industrial complex is making this bird chirping noise or it sound like a tea kettle boiling, but more like a little bird. The sound is mostly random except the customer says its usually after a page, but it would not do it for me when I was paging, only one time and it lasted for 5 seconds or so.. The chirping is system wide and the speakers are a mix of bogan 70v powered by bogan amps and bogan 24v self amplified speakers in outlying buildings... Basically, I couldn't troubleshoot it because i couldn't duplicate the sound reliable enough to narrow it down... but I did punch down the paging feed to the other building on a different pair in the underground cable, hoping that maybe that was the problem... Has anyone heard this noise on a paging system before and can give me a hint what to look for that could be causing it? the paging audio is also going through a viking feedback eliminator before it goes to any amp or speaker.

You might see if it is when a specific person makes the page.

perhaps a speakerphone pager is involved

I would suspect the feedback eliminator. It digitally records the page then plays it back. The unusual sounds you describe would be the kind of thing a digital record/playback system could create if it was on it's way out. Other than that, the only thing I could think of is that the sounds originate at one or more paging locations and are being picked up by the handset when the page is made. It's also possible (but not likely because the amps are always on) that the caps (particularly in the power supply filtering) in an amp are crapping out leading to motorboating or other instability that could sound like a bird chirping. But I think it would always be there, not just after a page.

-Hal

Thank you for all the responses, im leaning towards the feedback eliminator too. It's a viking fbi-1a. I haven't been back they said they haven't heard it since I was there, so maybe it was something to do with the underground 25 pair... Very unusual, but thanks to everyone for your time.

Dave

The customer called back weeks later and the chirping was back and more frequently.. I was able to get there and troubleshoot it. I turns out i traced it back to one bogan self amplified paging speaker that was mounted outside, all the connections were done on the exterior of the building and just had tape wrapped around them. the wires were bare copper and had green corrosion really bad on them, as soon as i touched the wire it denigrated and the noise went away. It was on the power side, so it just had low voltage or not constant contact.... i pulled the speaker pigtail inside and re-spliced the wire and the speaker still worked no noise. it make a small chirp when i hooked the power up, which seems normal and is probably the sound i was hearing, just over and over with the bad wire.

i just thought that was interesting that that one speaker made the whole facility have a chirping noise.

Dave

Thanks for the update Dave.
The problem as you stated, "just had tape wrapped around them" , wouldn't have happened if the tape was UL Listed. 😂