Send SMS Using Gammu Command Line Tool

My teleco has provided Internet facility in which you can put data SIM card in a USB dongle and use Internet. Its call Ncell Connect. In neighboring country like India, some of them are called Reliance Netconnect+.

In such data SIM card you can only use SMS and Internet. You can't make phone calls. So to recharge or to know about the balance or data balance you have to send SMS. For Windows the software to do all of these comes bundled with the USB dongle. For Linux we'll find our own way.

Let us use awesome program called gammu. For Ubuntu, click here to install.

After pluging in the USB dongle open terminal and type:

dmesg | grep tty

This will tell you where your USB dongle is connected. For example mine is ttyUSB0. Make note of this.

Now run gammu-config to configure gammu. You only have to change one thing here. In Port the value should be /dev/ttyUSB0 where ttyUSB0 is what you noted above.

Press OK and now we are ready to run gammu.

Your SMS are saved inside folders in you SIM card. For eg: Inbox and Outbox.

To see the list of folders type:

gammu sms getsmsfolder

You need to note the folder number here. In commands like delete SMS you have to give the folder number from where you want to delete the SMS. And you can also retrieve SMS from particular folder  by using this folder number.

But if you want to get all SMS then run:

gammu getallsms 

To delete all SMS from particular folder run:

gammu deleteallsms folder-number

To send SMS:

 echo "message" | gammu sendsms TEXT number

You will see the following message indicating successful message send operation.

If you want break, press Ctrl+C...
Sending SMS 1/1....waiting for network answer..OK, message reference=30

For example in Ncell connect to know the status of my data balance I'd run the following two commands:

echo "status" | gammu sendsms TEXT 9009

gammu getallsms 

To know the balance in Ncell:

echo "" | gammu sendsms TEXT 90011

To recharge in Ncell:

echo "Recharge-Card-Pin-Number" | gammu sendsms TEXT 90012

To subscribe to a data package of 500MB:

echo "500MB" | gammu sendsms TEXT 9009

Troubleshooting:

While running gammu if you get error:

No response in specified timeout. Probably phone not connected.

Check that you got ttyUSB* thing right as talked about in the first part of this guide. You can re run gammu-config.

BTW: You can also use wammu which is graphical frontend for gammu if you don't want to hassle with all these commands.