Comments on: Asterisk chan_mobile fail

By: Sebastian Arcus

Sebastian Arcus — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 21:55:00 +0000

Hi – not exactly an answer to your questions – just relating my experience. I’ve been using now for few years a Cambridge Silicon Radio dongle with a Nokia 5000 mobile. I’ve also tried it with success with a newer Nokia 2730 Classic. I first used it with Asterisk 1.6.x series, now it is working with Asterisk 1.8.x series. I found it a bit fiddly in the beginning – but nothing like as much trouble you seem to have had – thankfully.

One issue that I have is that the bluetooth connection reliably disconnects at the end of the call. I’ve stumbled over an Asterisk bug – which after few years of patches and investigation was eventually closed with (roughly) the conclusion: “This behaviour is typical of certain Nokia phones and there is nothing chan_mobile can do about it”. So I just set it to attempt reconnects every 10 seconds in chan_mobile.conf and hope nobody will call within 10 seconds of ending the last call.

I normally use it to leave my mobile at home when I go abroad – and use another mobile with a local sim form the country I am in. Then I get Asterisk from home to patch calls incoming on my landline and mobile through to my foreign mobile number where I am. It works out cheaper that way. Kind of a DIY roaming.

Good luck with your endevour.

P.S. – At the moment I’m working to get gnokii working with my phone over usb – so that I can have my SMS forwarded over email to me when I’m abroad. chan_mobile SMS only works with a restricted number of phones – mainly Symbian S60 devices from what I gather.

By: veejoe

veejoe — Tue, 10 May 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Thanks for the report! Glad to hear chan_mobile is working for someone. I guess I was unlucky with handset(s) and dongles I tried. Perhaps I’ll try again one day!

By: Ivan Stepaniuk

Ivan Stepaniuk — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:17:00 +0000

After having to fight against impedance matching, rx and tx gain, caller id methods, voltage thresholds… and after switching to chan_mobile+gsm, I have no doubts when saying chan_mobile “Just works”.

I’m using an old Nokia 6021 and it just works, both with my 2.1 Macbook’s bluetooth adapter and some cheap USB bluetooth adapter I had (0a12:0001 “Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)”), the last one being used in my Asterisk server. The only problem is that arround once a week the phone loses it’s audio link and the connection needs to be reseted. Bluetooth adapter and phone model seems to be still very critical. There are some compatibility lists around. Good luck!