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DTMF tone decoder

Decode telephone keypad tones from audio - the dual-frequency pairs that encode digits 0-9, *, #, and A-D.

Open in ctfpal

DTMF encodes each keypad button as two simultaneous sine tones - one from a low group of four frequencies, one from a high group of four. Sixteen combinations cover the twelve visible keys plus four military ones. The dual-tone design makes it robust against speech and trivially decodable from a spectrogram.

The frequency grid

1209 Hz1336 Hz1477 Hz
697 Hz123
770 Hz456
852 Hz789
941 Hz*0#
Each key is the intersection of one row frequency and one column frequency.

Because the frequencies are fixed and widely separated, decoding is a matter of finding the two strongest bins in each time window - which is why the spectrogram view makes DTMF visually obvious as evenly spaced pairs of horizontal bars.

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