[JohnM15141]

I'm on my second trip to Japan with my 17"PB. On my First trip here my Modem worked like magic. It changed to Japan and dialed with no trouble at all. I set it to dial ignoring the dial tone because Japanese Hotels use a pulse dial tone that is a Busy tone in the US.

Well, now I'm back in Japan staying in the same hotels using the same settings and its "no dice!!" My modem refuses to ignore dial tone before dialing. I have not changed any settings. The box for "Wait for Dial tone" is not checked just like last time I was here. But as soon as I hit "connect" it opens the line, hears the Hotel Pulsing Dial tone and returns "Line is Busy." It does this even though it is supposed to ignore the dial tone.

Now here is the curious part. If I remove the Phone line from my PowerBook Modem Port and hit "Connect" it dials, ignoring the dial tone.

If you're wondering how I am typing this message well that's curious too! I pick up the phone receiver and dial 0 which gets me an outside line, which has a normal dial tone, then I hit connect, wait for my Modem to dial ignoring the dial tone and then hang up the receiver. Weird!

The only change I made to my PowerBook when I was home was install the new Airport Update and installed RealBasic 5. That's it!

I'm a little perplexed as to what the deal is here. I can't try another Hotel room phone until tomorrow when I change Hotels.

Any ideas would be welcome.

PS(I'm posting this elsewhere so if you see it again don't flame me, I need help fast so I'm looking for a wider audience!

[icruise]

Are you sure it's not something peculiar about that particular hotel -- did you connect from that hotel successfully before? In any case, since you can get around it by dialing 0, it doesn't sound like a huge problem.

[urrl5201]

Some hotels have weak telephone line signals as far as computers are concerned. In fact I had to call my home telephone company to upgrade my home phone line to get more than 18000 kbps. Now I get about 48000

[JohnM15141]

Thanks for your suggestions. I tinkered with it all night racking up 10yen connection charges for each failed try but I figured out what went wrong and it's kind of "Henna Desu" (Strange!)

Here's what caused the problem. I have each location I travel to, setup in my Network preferences. So when I arrive in a new city I just select it from my Apple Menu under Locations. When I arrived in Osaka I selected my Location that I previously created. The I changed the Time and Date to my new Time zone, Japan from California. This caused the malfunction. I kept getting Modem script errors and the detecting busy signal even though I have it set to dial without waiting for Dialtone.

I set everything back to California,rebooted then I changed the Time Zone first before I changed my Location(in OS 9 the Location Manager took care of this in one step, this feature is missing in OS X) and "voila!" It worked!

So to sum it up Change your Time Zone before you change your Location or your Modem scripts will crap out on ya! When you change your Time Zone in OS 10.2.5 it changes your modem to comply with that countries phone line specs.

[urrl5201]

Thanks for the timezone tip, I will keep it in mind.
So even if I am only traveling in the US I must keep this in mind. That's a Ellen Feiss...Bummer.

[Fawad]

I changed my timezone to Cork/Ireland, however my modem still thinks Im dialling out from the United States..

My home PC connects at 45.2Kbps, my Pb's modem never higher than 33.6Kbps (And Ive tried this by enabling v,92 and v,90)



[Here's to DSL in a couple of months]

[JohnM15141]

Originally posted by Fawad:
I changed my timezone to Cork/Ireland, however my modem still thinks Im dialling out from the United States..

My home PC connects at 45.2Kbps, my Pb's modem never higher than 33.6Kbps (And Ive tried this by enabling v,92 and v,90)



[Here's to DSL in a couple of months]

Is your home PC a Mac? If it is, just for fun, try copying it's modem script to your PB and see what happens.