BT Paragon 500 handsfree doesn't work

shilcor

Hi All,
I have a BT Paragon 500 combined phone/answerphone (in fact I have two - both obtained in true moneysaving fashion from car boot sales). They are a really nice phone and work well except for the hands-free facility where the built-in microphone doesn't seem to work. The microphone works fine for leaving a memo or recording outgoing messages so it's not duff but if I try to use the phone hands-free I can hear the other person but they cannot hear me. Both phones exhibit the same symptom and it's definitely not the "secrecy" feature being set by mistake. I can't see anything in the handbook or in the menus so has anyone else got one of these phones and know what the problem might be?
The phone is described here :-

http://www.telephonesonline.co.uk/details.asp?prodID=840&title=BT+Paragon+500+Phones

rolyk

I'm having a similar problem with the handsfree on a Paragon 500. It seems to be caused by the ADSL v1.0 wallplate, the one that BT fitted in the early days of broadband. If I remove the front of the wallplate and connect directly into the BT socket behind it works fine.

To overcome the problem I now connect the Paragon 500 through a normal filter (one of the horrible dangly things) which is connected to the unfiltered rear connection on the wallplate. The rest of the phones in the house are filtered via the wallplate and work fine.

It'll be interesting to know if shilcor is using a filtered wallplate.

shilcor

Wow - forgot all about this question as I didn't initialy get any replies. Yes, I also have a BT installed ADSL enabled faceplate so sounds like the same problem. My faceplate isn't very easy to get to now (heavy desk with all my PC kit in the way ) but I'd be interested to know how easy it is to connect to this "rear un-filtered" connection as I have a couple of normal ADSL filters I could try.