Chapter 5 - Troubleshooting
Getting Garbage Characters on the Monitor
•Your computer and the remote computer may be set to different word lengths, stop bits, or parities. If you have connected at
•You may be experiencing line noise. Enable error correction, if it is disabled, or hang up and call again; you may get a better connection.
•At speeds above 2400 bps, the remote modem might not use the same transmission or error correction standards as your modem. Try connecting at a slower speed or disabling error correction.
(With no error correction, however, line noise can cause garbage characters.)
•Try entering the L8 (List Online Diagnostics) command in online mode, making a screen print of the diagnostics listing, and checking for parameters that may be unacceptable (number of retrains, round trip delay, etc.).
Fax and Communications Software Won’t Run at the Same Time
Communications devices can be accessed by only one application at a time. Under DOS or Windows 3.1x, you can run either your fax software or your datacomm software, but not both at the same time, unless you have a special communications device management application, such as
In this test, data from your computer or terminal is sent to your modem's transmitter, converted into analog form, looped back to the receiver, converted into digital form and then received back at your monitor for verification. No connection to the phone line is required. See Figure
55