Hi Daniel,
This is to do with sending IMS SMS, where the SIP Body is encoded as GSM A (GSM 03.38) containing the SMS TPDU.
There's a few things the smsops module couldn't handle, I'm using Kemi so I was able to correctly encode / decode the values we needed using an external library but then couldn't encode this as the message body.
Ideally I'd be able to take the output of the external library to encode as the message body (in hex as it would be on the wire) and set it as the message body, but I imagine this is a bit of an edge-case so probably not much demand for it.
In the end some recent commits that addressed the same issues with smsops I was facing enabled me to use the smsops module to do everything I needed,
Cheers,
Nick