How to Configure a Grandstream Handytone-386

 As part of my tutorials on configuring your own VoIP phone system, this is a step-by-step walk-through on how to configure the low cost Grandstream Handytone ATAs.  ATAs, or Analog Telephone Adapters, are kind of neat because they allow you to use any normal touch-tone you want, or even plug it into a house's existing analog phone wiring (after double-making-sure you're house is unplugged from POTS).
I got my Handytone on eBay, but even Amazon has the single port Handytones for a very good price.  The difference between the Handytone 386 I have and the Handytone 286 is that the 286 has a single phone port, where the 386 has two ports that you can configure to two SIP accounts, so it's essentially two 286s in one box.

And yes, that telephone is FABULOUS.  It also happens to be the only telephone I have access to...

Now, before trying to setup the hardware, I assume you already have access to some sort of SIP VoIP server.  This can either be by setting up and configuring your own Asterisk server, or more simply by signing up for an account from a SIP provider, such as SIP2SIP, which lets you have a free SIP account to call other SIP numbers and then only give them your payment info if you want to call POTS numbers.
  • Plug in the power cord, an Ethernet cable running to your router with DHCP, and a touch-tone phone into the FIRST port.  Wait a minute for the device to come up.
  • To configure the Handytone, we need to know its IP address on our home network to view its configuration page, much like how you configure a router.  To find out it's IP address, pick up the line 1 phone, dial ***02, and listen for the magical voice to say something like "IP Address one nine two dot one six eight dot zero zero one dot one five seven"
  • Now that we know the IP address, type it into a web browser like this: http://192.168.1.157/  This will hopefully bring up the login screen, where you can type in the admin password (hopefully the default "admin"). If the password admin doesn't work, you can reset the device per the instructions at the end of this post.
 
  •  Once you're in, most of the defaults as far as ringer, line voltage, etc are sane for North America. Click on the links for "FXS Port 1" or "FXS Port 2" and enter all of the information given to you by your SIP provider in the first five fields.  In the picture is everything needed to work with sip2sip.info.
  •  That should be it.  Plug phones into both ports, and you should have a dial tone and be able to make calls.  Calling other numeric SIP addresses in the same domain as you is as simple as dialing in their extension (i.e. I pick up my phone, which is 7653@sip2sip.info, and can dial 3333 to call 3333@sip2sip.info).  You can call other domains and POTS phones, but that's beyond the scope of this post, and you should just follow their instructions as such.

Resetting the device

If the default password doesn't work, and you don't know the changed password (e.g. bought it used), you need to reset the Handytone to factory defaults.  This is done by picking up the line 1 phone and dialing in ***99[MASTERPASSWORD], where the master password is the MAC address.

For example, reading the MAC address off the barcode on the bottom of my device, it is 000B820BB051.  All of the letters in the MAC address get encoded as: A - 22, B - 222, C - 2222, D - 33, E - 333, F - 3333.  Therefore, my MAC address becomes 000222820222222051, and the entire dial pattern: ***99000222820222222051.

This is all per the instruction manual found on Grandstream's website.

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