SpitFire Help Desk

The following article lists several symptoms and trouble shooting methods for analog phone line problems. 
See this article for digital line trouble shooting.

The two main tasks are to:
1. Be able to discover and demonstrate why the line or lines are not working.
2. Be able to determine whether the problem is with the phone lines (cabling, carrier, etc), the settings in SpitFire, or the actual Dialogic card hardware.

Symptoms/Solutions:

I. High amount of Others and phones being called are not ringing.   
Typically, this is due to phone lines not being plugged in or not having dial tone.
Look at the Line Stats tab to see if certain lines are showing this but other lines
are not. This will indicate the bad lines from the good lines.

   1. First, try to make a call though Dialogic's Multi-threaded Voice application so that
       you are making the call as close to the Dialogic card as possible.
       See this article for testing through Dialogic's Multi-threaded Voice.

   2. If the response comes back No Ringback Detected, this indicates that there is no
       dial tone on the line.

   3. If there is at least one line that works, use the Line Monitor utility to listen to the 
       problem line(s).
       If you hear digits but no dial tone and/or ringing, this verifies that the line has no
       dial tone.

   4. Have the person on site take the line out of the Dialer or the break out box and
       plug it into an analog phone to test. Important: The test should use the same
       line(cable) that was plugged into the dialer so you are doing the most complete
       test possible.

   5. Swap the bad phone line with a known, working line in the Dialer. So if line 1
       works and line 2 doesn't, swap the cables at the back of the Dialer.
       If the problem now moves from line 2 to line 1, and line 2 can now dial out,
       this confirms the problem is not with the Dialogic card or hardware.
       If the problem stays on the original line, then there could be a problem with
       the Dialogic card, DB-37 cable or breakout box.
       
   The lines could also be plugged into the wrong ports on the Dialogic card.
   1. The typical tower PC will have the cards plugged in, in a horizontal
       configuration. The jacks on the Dialogic card go from right to left as you
       face the back of the computer. See below:



      This image shows a 4 line, D/41ESC card and the line furthest to the right is line 1.
   
   2. The other type of 4 line card commonly used is the Dialog4 or D/4.
       This card has 2, RJ-14 jacks. The right-hand jack is lines 1 and 2
       and the left-hand jack is 3 and 4. Couplers provided by OPC Marketing
       allow 4 RJ-11's to be plugged into the 2 RJ-14 jacks on this type of card.

The other major reason for Others is bad numbers or incorrect dialing
properties in SpitFire.
   1. Check a few of the phone numbers that were dialed and
       received an Other disposition.
       If the number comes back "changed or disconnected", that is the reason for the
       Other designation.
   2. Also check the Line settings tab under Options->Preferences->Lines.

II. High amount of Busy Signals
Typically this is due to lines going through a PBX and not getting outside of the PBX.
If the Dialer line cannot get an outside line, a busy signal will usually be a result.

   1. Use the Multi-threaded Voice to test the lines and verify if receiving a busy signal.
       Try using a 9, in front of the number to test call. Or even a ,9, if the PBX needs more
       of a pause before the digits are being sent. A comma equals 1 second of pause.
   2. Use the Line Monitor to listen to the lines dialing and make changes to the
      digit sequence to see what works best on the lines.