Internal Details

The FCC ID internal photos aren't clear enough to make out too many component details. Figure 3 shows a composite of the 8002's innards with and without the LCD display and keypad.

Figure 3: 8002 internal details

Figure 4 shows a closeup of the main board where the only thing you can clearly determine is the SpectraLink custom chip. The 802.11b radio has 100 mW max transmit power.

Figure 4: Main board closeup

Wireless Configuration

The first task in setting up the SpectraLink 8002 was to get it on my wireless network. Since this has to happen before the phone can make contact with the provisioning server, all the initial network-connection information must be entered on the handset directly.

It’s at this point that I became familiar with the phones physical attributes. There are three buttons on the left side of the handset. When on a call, these function as volume up & down. When accessing the phone's menus, they serve as up and down navigation, with the small center button for selection.

During the initial power-on, the phone displays its MAC address. This is handy for locating the phone in a DHCP server activity table. To access the phone's core network setting you must hold the Power Off button down while tapping the Power On button.

Once into the network setup menu, you need to enter the ESSID (also known as SSID) for the target WLAN and the encryption type. The handset has three modes for ESSID entry, Learn Once (default), Learn Always and Static Entry. Both "Learn" modes scan for APs that are broadcasting ESSIDs and that have a DHCP server. When one is found, the handset retains the ESSID from whichever AP it associates with at that point.

The Learn Once option keeps that ESSID until the ESSID option is reselected in the Admin menu. Learn Always mode automatically reruns the ESSID search process whenever the phone is powered on or when an AP connection is dropped.

The phone supports WEP encryption as well as WPA and WPA2 wireless security. But only the "Personal" form of WPA / WPA2 that uses a Pre-Shared Key (PSK) is supported, which could be a problem for shops that use the "Enterprise" (RADIUS) form. At any rate, the WEP key can be entered either directly in hexadecimal, or as a passphrase that will automatically be converted into hex.

The process of manually entering the SSID and passphrase for the WPA-PSK encryption was a little frustrating. It was a simple matter of becoming familiar with the phone’s user interface while entering long strings.

Based on this experience, I completely understand why the example configs provided with the phone use simple 4 digit numbers for the SIP user login & password. These things are entered into the phone every time it powers on. Thankfully the basic network configuration is entered only once, then retained in the handset.

Tags: Polycom, VoIP,

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