Electronic Alarms and Home Security Devices - Vista 20p > Dialer & Zone setup questions and Possible defective siren?

New guy here trying to get the vista 20p (Protection One branded) up and running at our new house. With the help of this forum I was able to recover the installer code and reset the master user code, clear existing phone numbers, and get the basic functionality working. So thanks for that!

Question #1

Kind of running into a wall here getting the dialer functionality working correctly. Ideally, I would like to receive a (single) phone call when the alarm is triggered. At first I setup my phone number in *41 but then soon found out that it would attempt to call 8 times without a confirmation "handshake". However, I did like that it would call when as soon as the alarm was triggered.

I decided to try out the pager options so I put my phone number in *160, no characters in *161 and set the *162 report options to [4,4,4] (All alarms and troubles). When I triggered the alarm I didn't receive a phone call. I let the alarm sound for about 5 minutes and canceled the alarm with CODE + Off, Then cleared the alarm with CODE + Off. After clearing the alarm, I received a phone call from the dialer. Not exactly the result I was looking for and I don't see any other report options in the guide that would be applicable or maybe I am reading them wrong.

Question #2

When testing the alarm, I noticed that the only siren noise was coming out of the keypad. There is an external siren mounted in the hallway. When the alarm was first triggered, I heard the external siren make a noise similar to the keying of a walkie-talkie. I decided to try setting the confirmation arm ding *38 to [1,1] (yes, wired keypads and rf) and arming the system. After the system was armed I heard the external siren make two of the keying noises I heard earlier (no loud siren). Is this a bad siren? or am I missing a programming setting?

Question #3

Haven't got into the setup of zones or even the terminology of everything, but maybe someone can point me in the right direction. On my system, when AWAY is armed all zones trigger the alarm. But when STAY is armed I can open the back door and the garage door without triggering the alarm. I would like to add the back door and the garage door to the STAY option so that they will trigger the alarm.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Check your siren, it sounds like someone may have connected the 12v siren output of your panel to a _speaker_ instead of a powered siren. Look at the back of it; if it says 8 ohms and there are only two wires and no small circuit board, you may have the wrong sounding device.

Check and make sure that you have completly cleared the phone numbers from the *41 and*42 locations. If there is anything programmed for the primary dialer, it will dial that _first_ before switching to the pager.

For number 3, even if you arm in stay mode, the exit delay still times out.

Thanks for the reply, you were right about the exit delay for STAY. The siren is in fact some type of speaker. I still need to mess around with the pager stuff.