We got some phones from Costco a few years ago that have driven me nuts. My idea of a phone conversation, or any reasonable conversation, has two sides to it. If you do have a full duplex phone one side can give normal conversational clues to another person. In a semi duplex phone, one side can monologue forever without your being able to get in an “Ahem!” until you can finally catch them breathing, because only one side CAN talk at a time: transmission is not two-way. I am never, ever, ever getting another phone that is not full duplex, I don’t care if it does the dishes and vacuums the rug. I don’t know what happens to the other end of the conversation if they don’t have full duplex, but I am prepared to stake my claim on my half of the call.
the word you want in phones is ‘full duplex’ as best I can figure.
by CJ | Aug 5, 2010 | Journal | 19 comments
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Wow, I didn’t even know they made half-duplex phones. You might as well be talking on a radio…Over.
My only experience with half-duplex is on older computer sound cards setting up headphones to talk to each other over a LAN network…Out.
It’s just exactly like radio. But without the courtesy “over”.
These jewels are frequently sold in Costco and others of that ilk, and come in cheap sets of several handsets and an answering machine.
My word is, if you are looking for a bargain phone, corner the saleshuman and ask, “Is this full duplex?” and “Can I return this if you’re wrong?”
Break up the phone company and POTS goes to pot. How much money could they possibly save manufacturing a simplex handset instead of a duplex one?
Well technically they aren’t simplex because they “can” receive the other side, but not while the first side is talking. That’s why they are half-duplex, but we understand completely.
Simplex can only send or receive in one direction, a receiver set will always receive, a transmitter will always transmit, even if they are using the same frequency, the conversation will always be one way transmitter to Receiver.
Half duplex means that the two handsets share the same frequency to take turns receiving and transmitting, but they are only as good as the hardware/firmware/software that hands over control at the end of each transmission. This is similar to muting a conversation on one side while the other side is talking.
Full duplex means that each pair of handsets establishes two connections, one to transmit and one to receive, and both are active at the same time. This means that while you are talking you can also hear the laughs, sighs, and verbal cues from you telephone audience, and your audience can interrupt you or take over control of the conversation.
These are cordless phones, right?
Yes. If you can’t interrupt the other side once they start talking, on a cordless phone, that’s a half-duplex. If you easily talk back and forth as if they were in the room with you, that’s full duplex. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a half-duplex cord-based phone.
I do recall the infamous Dutch sisters on my gran’s phone line. A country phone in the old day was generally a ‘party line,’ meaning up to 5 households on the same line: when the phone rang, it rang, for instance, one-short for the Smiths, one long for the Williamses, short-short-short for the Adamses, short-short-long for the Svensons, and long-long-long for the Peters lot. Well, children would get confused, and pick up the phone when the call was for somebody else; and snoops would pick up and listen in; and then there were those that got around it—the Dutch sisters would get to the good part of the gossip, then lapse into Dutch for the punch line, and though my gran’s lot was Dutch themselves, they didn’t know the language. So that was a great frustration. I’m not sure it was duplex in the modern sense. I think it was just wide open.
The phone on the back porch was even older: it had a bell on the front, and a crank on the side. If you wanted to use that one, you cranked it: that used a magneto to generate a small current up the line to the operator in town: the operator noted your blinking light and asked you who you wanted, then plugged your line into the socket for that other household—her system (it was usually a woman) sent power for the conversation at that point, so you didn’t have to keep cranking. And sometimes you really had to shout, if it was a long line and low power: it took us years to cure my father of shouting into the phone…old habits.
The operators were a treasure. We went over to numbers and dials when I was in junior high, and we felt bereft—gone was the operator who’d take a message: you didn’t have e-mail in those days, to be sure, but you could pick up, the operator would come on, and you’d say, “This is Sammy Peters. I’ve got to stay after school and my mother’s not home. If she calls the school asking, can you tell her I’ll be home on the 4:30 bus?” In point of fact, if Sammy was late, the very first recourse would be Maisie the operator, and the mother would ask if she had heard from Sammy. It’s taken us the world wide web to replace Maisie, who was a lot better than any answering machine: she’d even hunt through several other phone numbers to track somebody down, being pretty well aware that Mrs. Peters could be volunteering at the Methodist church on a Wednesday afternoon.
I’d rather have Maisie back! I love technology and gadgets! However, I have a love-hate relationships with what I perceive to be the effects on society!
I remember party lines very well. One family on our party line had a son, a few years older than my sister and I. He had a colorful vocabulary and even if we picked up the phone innocently, he would unleash a blast of profanity at us when he heard the click. We took notes, but were rarely brave enough to actually SAY the words. We would have had our mouths washed out with soap, literally.
Since I’ve been spared explaining full duplex, half duplex, and simplex; I’ll offer that Costco may accept a return. You don’t need a receipt–they have the records. While the policy says 90 days, I’ve heard they will accept older returns as a goodwill gesture. And if you bought these under the old policy….
(The reason for the change in policy was that some people were returning their TVs or computers every six months or a year to get the latest and greatest model.)
I had a wireless phone (also from Costco). I think it dated to the last millennium. 🙂 It was full duplex, and I agree that any phone should be.
😆 If there is an oxymoron in the phone trade, it’s ‘half duplex’.
There is that thought, re Costco. They’re pretty good about returns. I don’t feel it’s altogether their fault for carrying the confounded things—I had to spend thirty minutes searching the internet to get *some* store, *any* store to reveal which phones were full duplex: Amazon didn’t; Costco didn’t: they’re busily selling what they themselves may not understand. I have the feeling that asking a salesbeing at any non-specialty store is going to get a blank look.
I finally settled on Best Buy, which I rarely go to…but they actually had it as a search criterion. Siemens was the company I finally found that had what looked to be a quality phone: you used to be able to rely on Radio Shack and the like—but that was when they sold boards and circuits. I hope I’m not wrong on this one. We haven’t had what I call a decent phone in the last half decade.
But it’s something to ponder…here we are in the 21st century, and our phone communication has actually taken a severe backstep…because these half duplex jobs are frequent in the market, especially the cheap ones. If you find you are suffering the half-duplex problem, there is better on the market.
I’m a long-term Costco customer, 20 years or so; and they’ve been slipping. Too many gold-plated items. Lousy choice in some areas (and not lack of choice, but all bad choices or all-the-same choices), and they have started to carry garbage. For at least 15 of those 20 years, something at Costco might be gold plated, but it worked perfectly. I bought a TV a while ago, and returned it: it was junk. After talking with techie friends, not only was my Sceptre junk, they’re well-reputed for junk. It’s Costco’s responsibility to sell good products: that’s why we pay the membership fee. I could rant for a few pages. :{
oh boy, definition of terms. That isn’t what was defined under those categories for us in Naval Communications. Simplex was send and receive on both ends, but not at the same time. full duplex was send and receive on both ends simultaneously (requiring tow separate frequencies or channels), and half duplex was defined as send or receive, but not both. I will not descend into a discussion of who’s right and wrong, since we all are products of our experience. I know that networking has their definitions, cell carriers have their definitions, and radio communicators have their definitions. Even amateur radio operators define simplex as send and receive but not simultaneously. A CB radio is simplex for radio communications.
I’m just telling you what WE were taught by Uncle Sugar’s Glorified Canoe and Kayak Club.
I’ve never run into one of those — and I agree it sounds like an unnecessary inconvenience in the twenty-first century — but I do remember making the odd call on a single-duplex line, back in the early days of transatlantic satellite connections — 1990-ish, I think. There was an appreciable light-speed lag, too.
wow.. I wasn’t aware they were still making half-duplex or simplex phones. I thought that was only left in some radio communications and part of the reason for their long life (which I thought had ended) was coding/encrypting which is handled by much faster processing now.
When I moved 3 years ago, I got a landline so I could have internet access, and bought VTech phones from Radio Shack because I loved the way they felt in my hand. Never even thought about simplex/duplex/half-duplex considerations–but if you are still looking, I like the phones’ performance very much. Have replaced the batteries only once, but then I don’t actually use the phones that often.
I can understand why they might do the electronics that way to save a few cents on cost.
I can’t understand why you haven’t accidently bounced it off the wall and clumsily
stepped on it, and then said “Gee, we seem to need a new telephone. How clumsy of me.”
Even though they are lowpower I never could figure out the reasoning that decided everybody
needed to broadcast their telephone conversations over the airwaves. My V-tech is encrypted
not because I’m doing anything exciting but I dislike the whole idea that we should give up
any pretense at privacy. I went to encrypted search for the same reason. My personal history
of association with the spooks has not made me feel any better about their current policy
of collecting everything just in case. Maybe it is their horrifying incompetence that makes
me feel less confident about their abilities.
The de-regulation of the telephone system allowed them to basicly abandon the plant while
they funded a bunch of blue sky ideas like becoming the cable TV and interNet providers
as well. When I worked with them in the 1970s they had finally cleared the bugs from the
technology and it worked superbly. By 1990 it was starting to fall apart from neglect. The
internal management model was the dumbest idea it was possible to use and the CEO of this
area was drawing a salary of 23 million plus perqs. I found it hilarious to think a fairly
normal human was worth that much. CJ might be and Dick Rutan, but few others are worth
even a million.
I think that Dick’s brother Burt is worth a few million – I think that I still have my rejection letter from Scaled Composites from when I applied right out of school… CJ is absolutely worth it. My current CEO? I can’t even figure out what his compensation package is – estimates run around $10 million, but as opaque as the books are in a multinational, who knows. Share price has gone down 58% since he took over – seems worth it to me.
😆 I could use a few more zeroes in my budget. If you find that million, let me know where it’s buried!
We spend our $2 a week on Powerball tickets. So far, no luck.
That’s beginning to look like a retirement plan in the book biz! 😆