OK, this is weird. I hope someone can help me. I have 1 phone line that is dedicated to our fax machine. Now, we are attempting to get my step dad to retire. Our fax has always been in his office. We did not want to take away his ability to fax out, but I need to be able to quickly get our incoming faxes. So, we installed a fax machine on the same line in my office, and turned his machine to manual. By doing this, I would expect either of us to be able to fax out (but not at the same time) and all incoming faxes would come to my machine. Sounds simple, right????

Incoming - No problems.

Outgoing - If I fax, what I fax ends up on his fax machine and the other people do not receive. If he faxes, it ends up on my machine, and not received by who he needs it to go to.

Both are Brother Intellifax 4100s.

WTH is going on????

I don't have an immediate answer for you, but I wanted to let you know that I'm intrigued by the problem and will give it some thought.

Meanwhile, have you tried contacting Brother? It's possible that there might be some setting you can change to allow the two machines to operate on the same line without disruption.

I don't have an immediate answer for you, but I wanted to let you know that I'm intrigued by the problem and will give it some thought.

Meanwhile, have you tried contacting Brother? It's possible that there might be some setting you can change to allow the two machines to operate on the same line without disruption.Yes, I contacted brother by email. I have never laughed so hard at their automated response (explaining to me how to plug it in and turn it on....)

To go a little more in depth (as we only installed this yesterday, and I have been messing with it today) when I dial out, I can hear the phone on the other end ring once, then while it is still ringing, I hear fax tones coming from my other machine!!!! If the line I am faxing to picks up on the first ring, it will go thru, but on the second ring, it appears the opposite fax is canceling the call and taking the fax. It happens regardless of which fax I am faxing from! Do they really listen in to the line??? This is really weird! (And yes, I do have the one fax set to manual.)

I believe your fax is "listening" to your phone line, waiting for a carrier signal from another device. When it senses the other fax machine on the line, it responds and completes the connections.

Now... how to make it stop doing that, I dont know. Something tells me that while this may not be "by design" it may be an inherent issue with more than one fax on a line.

My guess is that you may need to look into a device that offers something similar to what's called "barge-in protection"--basically, it prevents other devices from accessing the phone line while it is being accessed by your device (e.g., fax machine).