Some of you here appear to be heavy hitter dialup experts. Care to share your modem notes? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- maosredbrook · 2020-04-03 04:14 Also curious if any of you know of a modem on hold feature which might be workable if one didn't subscribe to call waiting. I'm particularly interested in finding an ultralow powered modem. Not line powered, but something which might be powered from batteries for years. ​ Any tips much appreciated. Specs rarely tell the full story. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- myself248 · 2020-04-03 16:00 The only thing I ever heard of people _actually_ doing with modem-on- hold was disabling it and disabling call-waiting and going back to their good old BBS time. Anything can be powered from batteries for years, if the batteries are big enough. You could look into some of the later-years Bluetooth modems for instance; these were substantially power-optimized. I have a Socket BM56S and it has an internal battery that'll run it for several hours, and that's driving both the line side and the bluetooth radio. It's an open question in my mind whether you could sneak enough power from loop-current to keep that battery charged in operation. I bet you could, and I bet Tomi Engdahl already has a schematic for it somewhere... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CharlieBrown197 · 2020-04-03 19:39 I agree with what u/myself248 is saying. The main problem you are going to find with a lot of earlier modems is that they take in AC power instead of DC. If you know anything about batteries, you know that they output DC. So that's going to be a little bit of a challenge. There are some things, though, that you can do with some modems to optimize them a little bit more. The only one I can think of is turning the speaker off. Another thing to consider would be a USB modem. I have a feeling that you could get a massive power bank, and power one off of the USB outlet for a long time. The only real problem would be designing a splitter to connect power and data to two different USB ports, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already done this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2020-04-06 21:24 [deleted]