5G Upgrade Kit Configuration | Cant set APN

Hello together,

I can not get my Turris Omnia 5G upgrade kit to connect to a 5G Network.

Setup:
5G Turris Omnia
Wifi 6 kit
5G Upgrade kit
(a couple of additional holes drilled into the box)

I followed the instructions ( Turris Omnia 5G upgrade kit setup - Turris Documentation) including the reboot and got a new interface ‘gsm’ that uses the ‘usb_5G’ device.
The interface ‘gsm’ is set to ‘DHCP-Client’, which does not allow me to enter a PIN or APN.

Is this the intended behaviour? I would have expected the modem to be managed by Modem-Manager.

Update: I got it to work by installing minicom, and setting the APN via AT commands. I highly suspect that this is not the intended workflow?

minicom -D /dev/tty5G2
AT commands after this guide (with adjusted APN name to my local phone provider):

You can change the interface-setup in luci from DHCP to another configuration and thus define the APN and alike.

Out of curiosity: Which packages are installed with the 5G-kit chosen in reforis?

Good Morning,

I can change the interface-setup to modem-manager (after installing it) and did so and failed.

I also found the 5G kit package definition (hardware/omnia/omnia-5g-kit/Makefile · 115345abcf7642fbc025b0a43951caa58233857c · Turris / Turris OS / Turris OS packages · GitLab).

Here we can see that it installs these packages:
+turris-nor-update
+mwan3 +watchcat
+luci-app-mwan3 +luci-app-watchcat
+kmod-usb-net-cdc-ncm +kmod-usb-serial-option
All of these packages make sense. However, there is something else:
CONFLICTS:=modem-manager-autosetup modem-manager

This setup should explicitly work without modem manager. And indeed, it does some fancy stuff (hardware/omnia/omnia-5g-kit/files/5g-kit.init · 115345abcf7642fbc025b0a43951caa58233857c · Turris / Turris OS / Turris OS packages · GitLab):
echo -ne ‘ATZ\r\n’ > “${TTY_DEVICE}”
echo -ne ‘AT+CGDATA=“M-ETHER”,1\r\n’ > “${TTY_DEVICE}”
It uses AT commands to reset the modem’s settings (actually reload from user profile) and sets the Communication mode towards the turris Omnia to “M-Ether” (which is not documented in the docu I found ( file:///home/lh/Downloads/Quectel_RG50xQ&RM5xxQ_Series_AT_Commands_Manual_V1.1.1_Preliminary_20201009.pdf).
I highly suspect this to stand for M(aster)-Ethernet, which corresponds to the interface setting as DHCP Client.

However, this seems to miss the initial modem configuration.
I suspect that you need to set the SIM cards PIN (if it is set), the APN and activate the Data context (see guide in my first post) and save all this with the command AT&W to the user profile.
I did not find any code that does this however.

In Turris OS 7.2.0 (hopefully released soon), there will be a major upgrade for the 5G kit usage: 5g-kit: Simplify the setup (!1244) · Merge requests · Turris / Turris OS / Turris OS packages · GitLab . It uses NCM protocol and allows to set APN and PIN from LUCI.

That is great news to hear! Sorry, I missed that one on the repos.

If you are kind enough to ping me, when it is released, I’d be very glad to test it and give feedback.

There was another thing (which did not bother me too much and I completely forgot until looking at the commit code):
The watchcat config is broken:
set watchcat.5gkit.pinghosts=‘1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8 9.9.9.9’
→ watchcat cant interpret this “IP”. I suspect, it needs a different separator then space. Maybe a comma or newline?
As a workaround, I set it in via the gui to only one IP:
set watchcat.5gkit.pinghosts=‘1.1.1.1’

Guess I ll request a gitlab account, as I am already looking at the code :slight_smile:

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Just visit the forum every now and than, it will get announced. There is first some testing round in test-branche, where you could (very much appreciated!) participate in testing the new packages/updated scripts.

It seems you didn’t have a look into the installation how-to.

Under Installation → 2. they write “Insert your 5G SIM card. Make sure that it doesn’t require a PIN to be entered.”
So the very first setup script was not meant to be used with a PIN. Imho a PIN does make sense when used in a mobile device (which can be stolen quite easily) but it is much less likely, that your router would get stolen, which is why I - after some hiccups with AT-commands - decided to remove the PIN upfront.

Actually i did remove the PIN. The problem was that it did not have an APN (AT+CGDCONT) set and the Data State (AT+CGACT) was not set to active.

I do agree with your reasoning about removing the PIN.

I can not specifically check the next part: I suspect that some SIM cards do provide the APN automatically, but german provider’s sim cards apparently do not (I had that problem on a research project I worked on in the past). If I am wrong about this, please tell me :slight_smile:

Well - the complete documentation is labelled as “experimental” - so obviously this means it will only work in a very small bandwidth of use cases. They need some reforis-interface if they want to have it deployed most easily, and this takes time to develop.

Did you remove modemmanager after it didn’t work? Because I read some posts in the last days stating AT-commands wouldn’t work when modemmanger is installed.

Now that you name it - I always needed to set the apn for my O2-cards (German as yours; I have the lucky situation that my employer has some contract with O2 that provides unlimited 5G max speed for 10€/month) first but then later on never cared about it.

I will try to get this card working in another environment, as I partly sold my Turris equipments (the second part will be deployed in my parents hosehold soon).

The answer is both yes and no.

I had a non-working stage where I reset the turris omnia completely and then modem-manager was uninstalled.
The current working stage is modem manager installed (but the interface is running DHCP Client) and i manually set the APN using AT commands once. (AT Commands via minicom do work for me).

It is OK that its labeled as “experimental”. This led me down the path of figuring out how to get it working by myself. I ll try to get some of that experience included in the official repos to allow other people to have a smoother experience when inserting a 5G modem.
Maybe i ll even post some pictures of my Turris Omnia Wifi6 5G-Backup for the documentation.

Btw.: I am very envious about your contract. I got 15GB shared across 2 cards for 8€/month (max 50mbit). As it is only the backup connection for my home (and my main mobile phone contract), I still feel like that should be enough. I d gladly take your contract however^^.

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