understanding/troubleshooting gnokii

Specifically, I'd like to understand what other software must work,
aside from gnokii. In short, when things were working well, what
softwares (internal to linux, kde, etc.) aside from gnokii were making
possible the data exchange between the netbook and the phones?

By browsing, I came to learn about hcitool and hciconfig, and I have
been using them to check the hardware. But I'm not sure if they are
active, when the live data exchange between netbook and phone is
happening.

What I'd like to do is determine where the failure actually is. I find
it remotely possible that all my 3 dongles failed at the
same time, so I suspect it is a software problem of some kind, not
necessarily gnokii.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion/help,

Roberto Verzola
Philippines