taserT asks: do you contact your phone company to get a personal fax number and does it cost anything?
I recently purchased the Brother 560 from Staples (the last time this deal was posted) and I've had no problems so far. Setting the machine to 'manual' allows it to share a single telephone line with your phone. It would probably take some juggling to know which calls are meant for the fax machine.
However, the cool thing about my phone service (and some of you might have this feature as well) is that they offer a feature called 'distinctive ringing' (at least I think that's what it's called). This feature comes along with all the other add-ons such as call waiting / caller id / last call redial / and about 15 others that came in a package deal (and that I will most likely never use) -- however, the distinctive ringing feature is GREAT for a fax machine. Basically (in non-technical terms) they give you an additional number (still only one phone line) that has a different sounding ring (you can pick it). This feature would also be helpful for multiple people households (i.e., your kid's friends would call in on a different number that would have a different ring to it) .... SOOOO, long story short, your 'talking' phone number could have a single long ring tone -- your fax machine 'distinctive ring' number could have a double (long long) ring tone. When setting the fax machine up, you enter in this information -- plus you enter in the number of rings it should answer the fax call by -- and you're good to go. Any single long rings are actual calls for you to pick up -- any long-long ring tones are automatically picked up by the fax machine. Hopefully this makes some sense ... and hopefully some of you have this feature. Let me know if there are more questions and I'll try to answer them.
Facebook
Twitter