How do I install my ISDN Card?

Installing an ISDN card can be quite a difficult task. Problems can arise in a number of places; a hardware conflict between your new card and part of your existsing hardware, a protocol problem between your card and the ISDN or a software or driver problem. Indeed it is often a combination of all of the above. The best piece of advice that can be given is to read the installation instructions that come with your card before you attempt to install the card.

Basically, installation of most of the popular cards revolve around finding a free IRQ and base address for the card to use, fitting the card (setting hardware jumpers if necessary), installing the software and running the setup program, selecting a physical D-channel signalling protocol to use and running any appropriate proprietry test software that is supplied with the card.

 

Finding a free IRQ and base address

  Finding a free IRQ under DOS/Windows 3.x is quite a difficult task, often only solved by trial and error. The BIOS setup program can often give you a clue as to what IRQs are being used by the COM and LPT ports, some others are standard, but the decision is really down to what other hardware you have on the system eg. sound, network, SCSI cards etc..

Under Windows 95 you can find free IRQs by using the System utility in the windows Control Panel. This utility lists all the installed hardware, or at least all that the system is aware of. By highlighting the Computer entry (usually the first in the window) and clicking on Properties you are presented with a list of hardware IRQs used on you system. Choose a free one and write it down for use later.

System Properties

 

  If there are no free IRQs on your system you may be forced to choose between some of your hardware. For example you may not need to have all you COM ports active or you may have two hard drive controllers with only one being used. If you do decide to replace some of the existing hardware you may have to turn it off in the BIOS (eg. COM ports), or it may be sufficient to do so from Windows 95.

 

 

Fitting the card

  All of the cards we have tested are quite easy to fit, most being standard 16bit or 8bit ISA cards. Some cards will require that you set the IRQ and base address using jumpers on the card, others can be set with a proprietry software interface, usually supplied on with the installation disks. Connect the card to the ISDN Network Terminator (NT) using the supplied cable.

 

 

Installing the Drivers

  KlasDrive supports a number of CAPI drivers, which should be installed with your card. Most of the IDSN cards come with an install program to copy the drivers to the hard disk and install them in you AUTOEXEC.BAT if appropriate. The install program should also allow you to set the IRQ and base address of the card if appropriate.

All of the ISDN cards give you a choice of what D-channel signalling protocol to use. The D-channel protocol is responsible for conveying call setup and management signals between the local exchange and your ISDN card. Making an incorrect choice will mean that you will not be able to make or receive ISDN calls. Different national carriers use different protocols, called National protocols, e.g. the German national protocol is called 1TR6, the American is 5ESS. In Europe the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has developed a pan-european protocol denoted DSS1 or EURO-ISDN which has been widely implemented by European PNOs; this is probably the best choice if you are in Europe.

  If you use an extended memory manager (eg. EMM386 or QEMM) and you are installing a card that provides CAPI support by way of DOS drivers, you may have to specifically exclude the range of memory used by the DOS drivers from the contorol the memory manager. The memory used by the drivers is usually selectable from the card setup program, an example is C800-C8FF. It is simply a case of adding the appropriate exclude switch in the call to the memory manager in you config.sys file, e.g. device=C:\dos\emm386.exe x=C800-C8FF

If you are using a card that only has support for CAPI 1.1 you may have to look at the issue of setting an EAZ when you are using a protocol other than the German 1TR6.

 

 

Testing the Card

  Almost all of the cards we have tested are supplied with a proprietry test program that will attempt to communicate with the ISDN and do some tests. By looking at the output of these programs it is usually possible to determine where a problem lies.