First PIAF install, mostly great, a few questions

[BrightRhino]

Hi,

I have just finished my first PIAF install, with a Rhino 4FXO-EC card, 4 POTS lines, 6 Aastra 57i phones and 2 57iCT phones. It is a soft multi-tenant, doctors with a related business in one premise. Most everything is working great, but a few things have me stumped and I would love any ideas on what I could research to fix them.

1.) I cannot get time conditions to work at all. The office is open from 8-4:30 M, Tue and Thu, 8-4 Wed and 8-3:30 Fri. the office is also closed for lunch m-f from 12-1. I have a set of time groups of each work day, and one for lunch. My inbound routes are set to my first time condition, monday, which check if the call is coming in during business hours, if so, then it goes to the time condition lunch, if true, then calls are forwarded to the paging service, if false, then they go to the IVR MainMenu, if it's not on to Tuesday, etc.

The calls are never sent to the forwarded condition, no matter if it's monday evening, or lunch, or whatever.

2.) I would like to replace their paging service with PIAF, but have not come up with a clear method. There are two doctors in the practice, and a third from outside the practice that takes on-call one weekend a month. One doctor is on-call m-f, then he or another doctor will have the weekend, then he or the first doctor will be on-call the next week. So, the staff needs a simple way to pick which dr is on call any given day. I am considering day/night with conditions to accomplish this. Would that work?

3.) There is some intermittent echo on all of the phones.

4.) The cordless handset on one of the 57iCt is quite staticky sometimes.

5.) When I have the calls forwarded to the paging service, the paging service is so quiet it is almost inaudible. I have an extension that is set to dial the number of the paging service, and night mode directs all incoming calls to that extension. Perhaps there is a better way.

Any ideas you have would be helpful,

Thanks,

BrightRhino

 

[jmullinix]

Are the time conditions working and the forwarding is not working or are the time conditions just not working?

The paging is easy. Have the machine take a voicemail, then e-mail the voicemail to the Dr.'s cell phone. You can also set the system to send an SMS to the Dr's cell phone to let him know a voicemail has been taken.

You will need to isolate your echo. Is it coming in on just one of your POTS lines? Is it just happening on one handset? Those are the first steps in resolving echo issues.

I would RMA the 57iCT that has the static on it.

I have found that when you forward calls that come in on a POTS line back out on another POTS line the volume is low. You might try setting up a VOIP service and forward these calls out on that service, or you can play with the volume levels in zapata.conf.

 

[BrightRhino]

The time conditions do not appear to be working at all, is there some way to see whether they have been invoked?

The echo is on all the handsets that they have used, and on all 3 of the POTS lines they use for incoming calls.

I will call about the rma, and try a voip line.

Thanks for your ideas.

 

[euser4life]

Have you tried to tune your Rhino Card? Google for "fxotune".
Have you verified that your Rhino Card's hardware echo cancellation is working

dmesg |grep rcbfx

You should see something like

rcbfx 1: G168 07 04 DSP Loader file size = 170 App file size = 48414
rcbfx 1: G168 DSP Ping DSP Version 106
rcbfx 1: G168 DSP Active and Servicing 4 Channels - f

Also try adding the following to your aastra.cfg, reboot the phones so they grab the changes.

headset tx gain: -3
headset sidetone gain: -2
handset tx gain: -6
handset sidetone gain: -5
handsfree tx gain: 0

Also make sure the phone's internal volume hasn't been turned up all the way.

 

[dghundt]

For time conditions, I think you'll need to create zap did's first.

 

[BrightRhino]

I have created zap did's which I initially used to send calls to an IVR, that works fine. I am trying to automatically forward the calls after hours and at lunch time. I am still looking for a way to trace the calls as asterisk processes them to debug the flow.

 

[BrightRhino]

dmesg produces:

root@pbx:~ $ dmesg | grep rcbfx
rcbfx 1: Rhino PCI BAR0 febff000 IOMem mapped at f8bf0000
rcbfx 1: Waiting for response from card .........
rcbfx 1: Firmware Version 2.1
rcbfx 1: firmware rcbfx.fw not available from userspace
rcbfx 1: Hardware version 13
rcbfx 1: G168 07 04 DSP Loader file size = 170 App file size = 48414
rcbfx 1: G168 DSP Ping DSP Version 106
rcbfx 1: G168 DSP Active and Servicing 4 Channels - f
rcbfx 1: Starting DMA
rcbfx 1: Spotted a Rhino: Rhino RCB4FXO (4 channels)

I added the gain commands to aastra.cfg, will need to wait until monday to test the phones. I am 1400 miles away from them now,

Thanks, each bit of information helps me understand what i am looking at.

 

[jmullinix]

Open a command window and issue the command

asterisk -vvvr

That will connect you to the running Asterisk sessions and you can watch call flow there.