Hello fellow retronetworkers,
For those of you who enjoyed my TRAU presentation last week, I got a very positive update. :) Today I got this TRAU powered up (after getting the right crimp connector parts from Digi-Key and assembling the necessary wiring harness for -48 VDC power to the box), and while I still don't have the additional hw that brings out E1 circuits, the management interface I got on the RS-232 port shows that this unit has everything we'll need to have lots of fun once those E1 connections are made:
* No password lock: the mgmt interface password is the factory default that's documented in the manual.
* There are 3 DSP fw images installed on the TRCO (the maximum it can hold per the docs), covering circuit types A, B and F. Circuit type F (the one it came configured with) is AMR, which is not of much interest to me (and apparently Nokia never implemented TFO for AMR in any of their TRAUs), but cfg A is 16 kbit/s FR/EFR/CSD and cfg B is 8 kbit/s HR - these are the ones I look forward to playing with.
* TFO feature is present, i.e., NOT excluded or blocked by "premium feature" schemes - yay! Obviously I won't be able to confirm it actually working until I get A & Ater E1 interfaces brought out and connected to my test rig, but the option to enable/disable TFO is present and accessible in the mgmt interface, and when I set it to enabled, it shows up as such in config readback.
The next step is for me to buy an ET2E module and the ET1TC chassis that holds it from shields-e (the same people from whom I bought the parts I already got), and then make my own cable with DIN 41612 connectors to connect the two backplanes - that's how we'll get the two E1 interfaces (A and Ater) out of this baby.
Until then, if you are curious to see what the management i/f for the TRAU looks like, here is a log of my RS-232 session talking to the box, from power-up:
https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/trau/tcsm2-boot.log
and here is the manual that describes this interface:
https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/Nokia_TCSM/tcsm2-command.pdf
Happy hacking, Mother Mychaela