Summary

To get a Billionton Bluetooth Class 1 USB dongle (probably this one) with the Broadcom BCM2035 chip, to work on Windows XP, download the 1.2 driver from here, and install it on your computer

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Yesterday I bought a cheap, really cheap (~$27 + VAT) headset for Bluetooth, a Hama BTH-150, and decided to hook it up to my Windows XP laptop so I can use the headset with Skype. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought.

About a year ago I bought a USB Bluetooth dongle from Billionton. It is a class 1 device, which as far as I can tell gives it a longer reach than personal Bluetooth equipment. I do not know if it helped with the headset I was going to use though. Maybe they both need to be class1 devices. However in the end I got very good range.

A couple of years ago I tried connecting a Jabra BT headset to my computer, and I could not walk around my entire apartment without losing connection. I hoped this time around that would not be a problem.

Back then I also had problems getting Bluetooth to work at all with the Jabra device. I found a web page that said that Microsofts Bluetooth stuff does not work and that you have to install some third party stuff to get connectivity. That turned out to be correct. I got it to work, but gave up on using it due to the limited range I could move in.

This time around I thought the Bluetooth incompatibilities would surely have been ironed out by Microsoft. That turned out to not not be the case. Pairing worked out fine, but there were no profiles presented (I needed the headset profile) so it was meaningless.

Incidentally, if you have a BTH-150, you may be confused by the instructions for how to set it in pairing mode. It says in the manual that you should keep the s1 button depressed for a couple of seconds to put it into pairing mode. These are virtually the same instructions as for how to switch it off, keep s1 depressed for a couple of seconds. The trick is to realize that they mean that you should start with headset switched off to get into pairing mode.

The Billionton site sucks. they do not have a support or downloads section. Still the stuff is there, if you resort to a bit of googling. I found two dongles that looked like mine, that were class 1 devices. I'll be damned if I could make out the difference between them but then I realised they had the same chipset, and that is often what matters.  At another part of their site that I found through Google, I then found a list of drivers with different version numbers. It is not clear what these numbers mean. They seem to be ordered along the release dates, but they seem to serve different chipsets.  It meant I should use the 1.2 version. I found the 1.2 driver from here and downloaded it. It took a while with the download being 65 MB and the speed about 9KB/s. The FTP server asks for a password, but anything seems to be fine.
The install was painless, I re-paired the headset and computer and it got the headset profile and it worked fine in Skype.

The initial tests seem to indicate that the bluetooth headset has a high noise level. I will need to do some more tests, but I bought this el cheapo device so that I can find out more about what I really want to to get out of a Bluetooth headset.

The range is excellent. I can walk around my apartment and get good reception everywhere.