Generating DTMF using a 'player' on GTH

Posted June 9th 2009

The GTH can transmit in-band signalling tones on a timeslot. That's useful for testing and for building active in-band signalling systems.

DTMF

The tones transmitted when the subscriber presses a number key on fixed or mobile handset are called DTMF. Wikipedia has an article about it. To generate DTMF, all we really need to know is that there are 16 possible DTMF signals, that each signal is made up of two sine waves of particular frequencies and that sending the signal for 100ms is a reasonable thing to do.

Here's a .zip file with DTMF tones in it. Each file is raw ALAW data, i.e. it's ready for the GTH to play (transmit) on a timeslot.

The GTH has two ways of playing tones. One way is to stream the audio data in over a TCP socket each time we want to play it. I wrote a post about that earlier. The other way is to store the sample data on the GTH and command its playback whenever it's needed. Since there's a small number of different tones (12, or 16 if you want to use the A/B/C/D tones as well) and the tones are short, storing them on the GTH makes sense. To store the tone:

<new><clip name='dtmf5'></new>
(and now send the 800 byte file)

to play the tone later on:

<new><player>
  <clip id='clip dtmf5'/>
  <pcm_sink span='3A' timeslot='19'/>
</player></new>

Sequences of tones

Sometimes you want to transmit a sequence of DTMF tones, for instance to simulate a subscriber dialling a number. The GTH lets you start a player with a sequence of tones like this:

<new><player>
   <clip id='clip dtmf5'/><clip id='clip dtmf6'/><clip id='clip dtmf8'/>
   <pcm_sink span='3A' timeslot='19'/>
</player></new>

But that isn't a valid sequence of DTMF tones. Why not? Because DTMF expects a gap between tones. The cleanest way to handle that is to define another clip consisting of just silence and putting it between each tone. A good 'silence' value on E1 lines is 0x54. 60ms (480 samples) is a reasonable length.

Other in-band tones

DTMF in-band signalling is used in pretty much all handsets (telephones), mostly for dialling, but also to navigate menus in IVR systems. But before SS7 became popular, in-band signalling in the form of CAS and SS5 was even used to communicate call setup information between exchanges. GTH can also generate those tones, but that can be the subject of another post.