Do you have a gizmo that will allow me to......????

In the past, unfortunately, these line sharing divices were expensive and worked only about 50% of the time before they burnt out. The concept was great, but the actual gadgets manufactured to do the line-sharing were mediocre. Now, as technology advances at it's usuall breakneck pace, these have been improved and gotten less expensive and are finally doing their job efficently at low cost.

Fax switches work on a simple principle in that they answer the phone line on the first ring (some are programmable) listen to the line for CNG (the data signal a fax produces) and then route the call to the appropriate device -- either phone or fax.

Ring processors use selective ringing from the phone company (Verizon calls their selective ringing service Ringmate(tm) -- your local phone company may call it something else) to process the call. This service assigns you multiple phone numbers on the same physical line (usually 2, but even 3 numbers are possible), each with its own distinctive ringing sound. The processor can detect these rings and route the call accordingly.

Ring processors have two advantages over fax switches - first, they have no error rate, whereas a fax switch may not always properly detect a fax call. In addition, they can be used for other things than simple fax detection. For example, you could have 2 lines of business operating on the same phone line and use a ring processor to decide which answering machine callers should be sent to.

The only disadvantage of ring processors is that the phone company's selective ringing service carries a monthly fee, (although it is much less than the cost of additional lines) whereas a fax detector incurs no additional monthly charges.

Where there is a need, there is a Gizmo