First … THANK YOU to all who have offered great suggestions. I’ve learned much.
However, this is embarassing.
Using the ‘butt dial’ suggestion I connected an old touch tone phone to our line. I tried dialing one of the sequences the phone system has been dialing, and got the same result.
Then, it hit me, try just dialing the phone number without any ‘9’ or ‘8’ etc. prefix. Voila! The call goes through. I try again with success. Now I try and note about how long it takes before I get dial tone. It’s less than a second but there’s a definate delay.
It turned out that my misunderstanding of the outgoing call and prefixing all calls with a digit, any digit, was “mostly” acting as a ‘wait’. But sometimes that incorrectply prefixed digit didn’t work as a proper ‘wait’ and AT&T heard it. Thus giving me ‘incorrectly dialed’ phone number messages.
So, I revised my dialing rule to prepend two waits ‘ww’ (but not any digit) before dialing the outgoing number. Specifically, in the Elastix config file extensions_additional.conf I now have this line in the [macro-dialout-trunk] section:
exten => s,n,Dial(${OUT_${DIAL_TRUNK}}/ww${OUTNUM},300,${DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS})
I have to be careful because each change in the Elastix interface will overwrite my dialplan change and remove the ‘ww’ prefix.
Now that I’m able to dial out reliably I am adjusting rx and tx gains in addition to echo tuning.
Though, I’d like to note that changing txgain still does not change the amplitude/volume of the DTMF tones sent while Asterisk dials the number. Regardless o whether my txgain=0 or txgain=60 (yes, I tried 60) the dahdi_monitor -vv shows about 5800 for the DTMF tones when dialing. Maybe there’s something else at work here that I’m missing, but I’m simply indicating what I’ve witnessed.
Now, on to a few other tidbits, like overriding the caller-id for all outgoing calls so they appear to come from our main line, not any of the roll-over / hunt group phone numbers. But that’s for another thread.
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to follow up answering dicko’s questions:
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I turned of echo cancellation through chan_dahdi.conf, echocancel=no and echocancelwhenbridged=no and commented out echotraining
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toneduration=120 set in chan_dahdi.conf
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I did shut down asterisk before running fxotune, otherwise the system did complain
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I ran fxotune -s after restarting dahdi and before starting asterisk
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The Butt Set call is what tipped me off to the likely issue of incorrectly prefixing the outgoing number.
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In fxotune -i 4 -b 3 -e 3 -vv ; the ‘4’ was the number to break dial tone, though the default of ‘5’ worked just as well. I was limiting my tests to channel 3, thus the begin and end parameters set to ‘3’
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Yes, I’m using KewlStart
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Card broken? I don’t think so but would have now way to tell.
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Thanks again to all who’ve offered suggestions. This forum is truly alive and well with talented people willing to donate their time.
Best,
Jason
