Thursday 21 February 2013

PageGate and SMS Messaging using a USB/3g Dongle

Anyone out there use PageGate? Anyone out there heard of PageGate?

It's another system that I maintain for a client. Basically, it acts as a gateway allowing emails, modems and other things to communicate with it and then forward a text or email on to a specific recipient. 

Why? That's not important, suffice to say it routes hundreds of emails and turns them into texts via AQL. AQLs service has been great so far (thanks guys) but a lot of cash is being burnt by having to pass it through another portal so the decision has been made to send the texts ourselves using a £10 USB dongle.

Thats the plan. Enter Des to make it work.

PageGate does support USB dongles, but it doesn't make it very clear (the product is great, but there are so many things it can do it isn't all documented).

A bit of playing around and yielded the following method:

1: Install and get your USB dongle working in the system
2: Open PageGate admin and go to Connectors
3: Select your connector (1 in my case) and give it an Auto init string and set the Serial Port to the correct COM port number that the dongle is tied to.
4: Now go to your carrier section
5: Add a new carrier and name it (GiffGaff in this case for us)
6: Set the following: Protocol GSM-AT, Baud 11500, Parity None, Data Bits 8, Stop Bits 1, Init String AT+CSQ and click apply
7: Now go to your recipients and create a new one
8: In settings, set the carrier to the one we just created above
9: In ID/PIN enter the mobile number of the person you want the text to go to (this is the bit not well documented!)

That's it - give it a test and you should find your text arrive straight to he mobile device.

It's a great bit of software, the guys at PageGate should be proud especially with V6 our now which I haven't yet tried.

The above is working for me in the UK, so our US cousins may not get the same results. Also, the mobile number that I used was left as an 07 number and NOT changed to an international 44. Does it make a difference  I'm not sure, but it works so i'm not going to find out :)


Update: I saw someone reference this article on the PageGate forum, so will update this with a few points that seemed to confuse them: the SMS messages are sent over the GSM network and do not require a data connection. However, some of the modems you can buy use a protocol known as Hi-Link, which makes the dongle act as a local Ethernet device - this doesn't work correctly with the above as you need the dongle in its traditional operation mode. If you check the manual there are often ways of making the mode operate in this way instead.

Hope that clears a few things up.


3 comments:

  1. company has introduced a number of 3G Data Card In India with high speed internet connectivity attributes, for benefitting users by providing them wireless broadband.Airtel broadband plans are offered for various purposes including audio and video confrencing.

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  2. What make of dongle? I've got a Huawei e3131

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    Replies
    1. You may struggle with the e3131 as it uses something called 'hi-link'. This makes the modem act as a network device (similar to an ethernet or wireless device) rather than a standard dongle.

      Many of the modems have a way of changing them back from being a hi-link to standard modems but again it isn't easy to do this on a rpi

      You'd probably save yourself some grief by using a different dongle to be honest!

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