592 There are two types of telephones commonly in use around the world, pulse (rotary dial), and touch-tone (buttons). The two systems of dialing operate quite differently from each other. Pulse dialling actually hangs-up your phone for 0.05 seconds for each number in each digit. For example, if you are dialling the number 6, your phone briefly hangs-up six times in rapid succession. This short hangup is too brief to actually disconnect you, but it is just long enough for the phone company's switching equipment to notice. One problem with pulse dialling is that the higher the digit, the longer it takes to dial. The digit 1 only takes a tenth of a second to dial, whereas 0 takes an entire second to send ten pulses. Touch-tone dialling uses Dual-Tone MultiFrequency (DTMF) Hz 1209 1336 1633 to signal what digit was dialed. This means that the phone generates two tones (or notes), one representing 697 1 2 3 the row of the digit, the other representing the column (see the chart). For example, if you are dialling the 770 4 5 6 digit 6, your phone would generate a 770 Hz tone and a 1633 Hz tone and simultaneously send them both down the 852 7 8 9 line. The phone company's switching equipment needs only a tenth of a second to figure out which two tones 941 * 0 # are present, and thus what digit was dialed. . 0