How to send “Flash SMS”

Flash SMS is a type of SMS which will be displayed directly on screen once received. This one is known working on Nokia mobile phone, I don’t know with others. As we know, normal SMS once received is saved either on SIM card or mobile phone memory and then user is noticed by a beep or similar SMS alarm. Flash SMS is different.

Flash SMS is done by define message class part of TP-DCS of SMS PDU to zero (0x00), what TP-DCS is? Please read GSM 03.40 :). Here’s an example of SMS PDU (in hexadecimal):

15010A91561904472800F4A718496E6920636F6E746F6820666C61736820534D53206C686F

Let us breakdown:

• 1st byte: 0x15 or in binary 00010101
  • TP-MTI (bit 0&1) = 01 means this PDU SMS type is SMS-SUBMIT
  • TP-RD (bit 2) = 1 means reject duplicate if there’s a same SMS with same TP-MR
  • TP-VPF (bit 4&3) = 10 means this SMS contain validity period info with relative format
  • TP-SRR (bit 5) = 0 means we don’t ask for delivery report
  • TP-UDHI (bit 6) = 0 means no user data header information (UDHI)
  • TP-RP (bit 7) = 0 means reply path unused
• 2nd byte: TP-MR = 0x01, means message reference number is 0x01
• 3rd byte: TP-DA length = 0x0A, this is length of destination address.I want to send to my own number which is 6591407482 -> see there’re 10 digits, to TP-DA should be 0x0A or 10 in decimal
• 4th byte: TON/NPI info = 0x91 or in binary format 10010001
  • TON (bit 6,5,4) = 001 -> means International Number
  • NPI (bit 3,2,1,0) = 0001 -> means ISDN telephone number
• 5th byte .. 9th byte: 5619044728 -> this is the destination number 6591407482 but written in BCD semioctet format
• 10th byte: TP-PID = 0x00 -> means use default protocol identifier
• 11th byte: TP-DCS = 0xF4 or in binary format 11110100
  • Bit 3,2 = 01, means TP-UD (user data) is encoded using 8 bit format
  • Bit 0,1 = 00, means class 0 {this will make this sms become flash sms}
• 12th byte: TP-VP = 0xA7 means this SMS is valid only for 24 hours
• 13th byte: TP-UDL = 0x18 means the user data/message part length is 24 character
• the rest byte:
  • 496E6920636F6E746F6820666C61736820534D53206C686F
    • Thi is hex representation of string “Ini contoh flash SMS lho”, you may use http://www.ttdpatch.net/cgi-bin/str2hex.pl to convert from hex to string and vice versa

Now we try to send it using AT+Command, here’s an example session

And the result on mobile phone is:

Now, save it before you lost it 🙂