Saturday, August 21, 2010

New FXS/FXO Card

Well the initial experiments with the X100P card (single line) went well. The card itself was a little flaky, but the overall concept looked good. So I decided to take the plunge and get a real TDM card. I decided on the OpenVox A800P card. This card is a knock off of the Digicom TDM800P, but at 1/3 the cost. I got the card with 2 FXS and 3 FXO daughter-cards. This well allow me to reuse all the phones in the house and several other devices without change and also allow me to run 3 outgoing lines. The card is large and requires a power connector (due to the FXS options). I actually had a hard time getting it into my PC case. Especially with the 3 hard drives I have in that machine. I have a total of 5 drives connected to the machine, so I may need to rethink that layout in the future.

Anyway, again getting the card installed and working was tricker than expected. I followed the instructions on the OpenVox website on how to get the drivers working. They didn't even compile, but it was due to a kernel issue. So I made a minor patch to the OpenVox drivers and then it compiled. Again the dahdi-tools had trouble with the card. I had to force some of the things to work. Hopefully, when I reboot the machine next time it all just comes up. I would think that the hardware drivers would be better than this.

I setup asterisk and I've made a couple of outgoing calls, the call quality seems ok so far. I'll have to test it on a longer call next week to ensure it doesn't drop, this is a problem the X100P card had.

1 comment:

DWHP said...

Looks like you have done this a couple of years ago now. can you recall if you had to do any configuration to work with Australian pstn? all i get is load static (like an old analog tv without a picture) on the handset and the outside caller only hears silence.

asterisk see's my card fine. its the same as yours.