Orchid V4, V4+ and Ranger 400 phone users - Discussion

Heinz

The Penny Mobile add-on means, if you know a call to a mobile is going to exceed 2 minutes during the week (or 5 minutes at the weekend) you can key the 121 prefix to override the Orchid and stop the call going out via 18185 but send it instead on Primus Saver Option 2/Penny Mobile 2.

Yes, you have to know (or be fairly certain) your call will exceed those times to make it worthwhile but, if you do, the price comparisons are:

Using 18185:

Weekdays

5p connection + minimum of 1 minute at 6p during the week = 11p
5p connection + 1 minute 1 second (2 minutes charged) during the week = 17p
5p connection + 2 minutes 1 second (3 minutes charged) during the week = 23p

Weekends

5p connection + minimum of 1 minute at 3p at weekend = 8p
5p connection + 1 minute 1 second (2 minutes charged) at weekend = 11p
5p connection + 2 minutes 1 second (3 minutes charged) at weekend = 14p
5p connection + 3 minute 1 second (4 minutes charged) at weekend = 17p
5p connection + 4 minutes 1 second (5 minutes charged) at weekend = 20p

See also THIS POST.

gorblimeyguvnor

Right, gotcha. Thanks Heinz.

shilcor

Hi All,
I've had a V4 dialer for over 2 years now and it's brilliant but a couple of days ago I tried to get it to Call Home after updating and tidying my routing table (due to moving from Onetel to Sky Talk) and it stops after only 13 flashes of the LED instead of going for a good minute or so. I've tried call home several times over the last couple of days and even tried a complete reset sequence as posted somewhere in these forums but it still fails to update properly. I emailed support at Orchid but so far have not had a reply. Has anyone else seen this problem and know what I might be able to do to fix it?
When I lift the handset of the phone plugged into the dialer the LED takes about half a second or more to s-l-o-w-l-y come on and doesn't seem particularly bright. I can't say I've really taken a lot of notice of the LED before apart from making sure it flashed for a good minute or so when updating its routing information but I wondered if I have a hardware fault with the dialer or if there's something wrong at the server end of things that's causing the update to end prematurely.
Any suggestions ?

Heinz

I can't get my Ranger 400 to successfully dial home at the moment either (although I succeeded on 29 October). Perhaps there's a server problem.

I'll e-mail Toby to ask him to check it out in the morning.

shilcor

It seems like the server is down because I just tried phoning the Call Home number 01536272200 and it's always engaged so at least now I know why Call Home isn't working. Would be handy if Orchid put something on their web site to let us know.
A work colleague has just bought a V4 dialer and he never received any replies to his emails but when he called Orchid, they were very helpful. When I first got my dialer they responded to emails almost immediately so I don't know what's caused their email customer service to go down hill. Maybe it's just a "blip".

BritBrat

CWClient is working OK, maybe they just have phone issues.

RatAtAt

Heinz wrote: »

I can't get my Ranger 400 to successfully dial home at the moment either (although I succeeded on 29 October). Perhaps there's a server problem.

I'll e-mail Toby to ask him to check it out in the morning.

Thanx Heinz - I'll leave it to you to contact Orchid.

For the record, I first had a 'dial home' failure Friday evening, but only noticed when a call to USA did not route via my new instruction, then had several failures Saturday (box LED only blinked for about 30 seconds), then further failures yesterday, so was intending to follow it up today (Monday).

But BTW, I guess my V4 is still using the prior routing table, and has not reset to 'no action' (I will not know until later today), but if I had disconnected it from the phone line in an attempt to make it 'dial' home', would it then have lost all it's previous routing info? (I've not done that!)

Heinz

RatAtAt wrote: »

....... if I had disconnected it from the phone line in an attempt to make it 'dial' home', would it then have lost all it's previous routing info?

No, but it would have lost its day/time settings (but you could have loaded them again my using the manual method).

Anyway, I'm told it's all working again now.

Paphos_Gooner

gah, do you know how long i spent last night trying to get it to dial home!!!

a long time!

in the end i gave up as i thought my current isp provided service (nildram hometalk) was stopping it working.

gave one dialler to the missus to try back at her house now and it updates fine.... what's the bets i try the other dialler i have here at home and it too works fine

shilcor

Spoke to Orchid support yesterday morning and they said there was some kind of outage of their dial-up service over the weekend. Sure enough, everything worked fine when I got home last night so I guess the easy way to check if there's a problem in future is to phone the call home number manually and listen to what response you get. Engaged signal means there's a problem - at least that's what I got this weekend.