Mechanical horn trouble

Hello I have recently installed a simplex 4001 and it works fine but with mechanical horns it makes them sound very weird. I don’t know if it is the resistors or if its something else. The horns tend to sound like they are doing a hi low kind of thing. Ex simplex 2901 9838 9833 9806. Please help! Thanks!

Is there a video that you can show us so we can hear whats going on?

If you don’t have batteries in your 4001, the panel may be putting out FWR current.

How would batteries change the voltage if it has ac power I could understand if it had no power

FWR.
The power adapter might be cheap and non-regulated and it might put out filtered wave rectified power instead of regulated voltage, unlike batteries that are DC and don’t have this problem.

It still doesn’t answer my question

Batteries don’t change the voltage - when batteries are installed in a 4001, it uses the battery current for the NAC’s which is naturally filtered. If no batteries are installed, it uses the panel’s unfiltered FWR current which makes the horns sound raspy.

Oh I did not know that thank you for telling me

I do have batteries in my 4001 though. when I unplug the power the horn sounds ok but when ac is plugged in the sound bad

How an i eliminate the fwr?

There is no way to turn off AC power unless you unplug it

I seem to recall that an earlier or later generation of the 4001 puts out FWR even when batteries are installed. You might have one of them. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way that you can eliminate it other than to mess with the power supply, but I don’t recommend it. You could always buy an Altronix power booster panel, but I don’t think it would relay the panel’s coding.

Could it be the batteries are bad? I have the system plugged into the wall should I have a stand alone power supply for it?

No, it sounds like you’re doing everything correctly. If the batteries were bad, you’d probably get a power trouble.

You should anyway

I did some testing and the fwr only affects the horns a little bit with the batteries. Without the batteries it sounds even worse. I can handle the small raspiness but could this ruin my horns? I read that the fwr can ruin them but if its only a little bit is it ok?

It’ll make the mechanical horns sound like crap.

As long as you don’t use anything with a Simplex strobe or Simplex electronic horn on it.

As for the question about power supplies, some NAC Extenders have a “Sync” input (One example being the Notifier FCPS-24S8) where the panel controls the coding of the NACs in the extender panel.