interesting alarm

5:30 am, my alarm monitoring company calls. btw, i'm in a hotel in alabama...

"we recieved an alarm, is everythign ok?"
"um, im' not home, so i don't know"
"would you like us to dispatch the police?"
"umm, yes"
"if we find anything else out, we'll call"

15 mins later, i'm still panicing. i pull out the laptop, and log into my pc. "phew, if they stole anything, at least they left my computer..."

then i dial into my alarm, and check. it still says "no alarms, currently armed". odd... then it dawns on me: the system test i did last week also spawned a phonecall as "burglar". maybe these are related...

a tech support phone call later reveals that i'm sending 4+2 signals vs CSID. here's the issue (for anyone interesting):
***4+2 sends the 4 digit account number (ex: 1234), and the code for the problem. i.e. you can have a burglarly as code 01, ac power loss as 02, zone bypass as 03, etc.
***csid sends your account number and the zone and the problem... so it might send 1234 03 01 which might be zone 3 is code 1, which is "has a problem".

the monitoring station only accepts code's 0's and 1's. everytime a problem was sent, it'd send it's value: 01, which was burglar.

so this mornign was a false alarm (the system was sending an "everythign is ok" monthly check notice, but the monitoring station interpreted it as "burglar on zone 01 (back door)"

now, it's fixed. tested, and working. yeah me :)