Homeschooling and fax machines?

Can you plug two fax machines to one fax line?

• We have one fax line but we want to install two fax machines in two different phone jack. If two fax machines are installed will both receive the same incoming fax? or eight one? Anyone know?

• Answer:

  Setting up 2 fax machines on the same line without a good reason for doing so is just not a good idea. The fact is, if they both answered the line at the same time, you probably would get nothing. Here is why: Each fax machine that answers goes through a routine which involves handshaking signals with the sending machine and I can assure you that all this will cause the second machine picking up on the same line to start sending spurious handshake signals down the line, thus causing the first machine to error and drop the fax before anything useful ever happens. The ONLY reason I can think of to have 2 fax machines on the same line is if your telephone line has something called distinctive ring and you can set them both up to answer a unique ring. The you get distinctive ring 1 and fax machine 1 answers while fax machine 2 does nothing, and so on. Now, exactly why you might want to do this I have no idea. We used to have two telephone lines in the house. One for voice and one for fax. Distinctive ring allowed me to get rid of one line although I still have 2 numbers assigned to me. We have the fax set up so it reacts to only the distinctive ring for it and it answers on either the first or second ring. Voice calls have a different right which the fax machine does not react to... so no more of the fax accidentally being left on auto answer when it is really a voice call. This does not appear to be what you are doing, but I just wanted you to know having distinctive rings for each is the only reason having 2 one one line will work.