vB Easy Archive - quad band on an A630? Does 850 band exist?

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quad band on an A630? Does 850 band exist?
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Posted by: sendpaulmailat

I have an unlocked T-Mobile Motorola A630 phone. I just tried to do my first seem edit to activate the 850 band that I've read is supposed to be supported on the phone. Specifically, I edited seem 0032_0001, offset 50, so that bit 0 was checked and then edited seem 0025_0001, offset 0, so that bits 0, 1, and 3 were all checked. I downloaded the seems from the phone, made my editing changes and then uploaded them to the phone. After making the changes, I downloaded them again to be sure the changes had been made. Everything looked okay. (I downloaded them into the editor; I didn't make these changes on a file stored on the PC.)

When I turned on the phone, however, it keep searching for a network and never found one. I tried undoing what I had just done -- following the same steps and resetting the bits back to the way they were before, all without success. The bits were apparently reset, but the phone would just look for the network and never find it.

I had made a flex backup of the phone before I did all this and, fortunately, when I installed the flex on the PC back to the phone, everything looks like it works again.

I'm sure that I did everything just as I've described it here. Does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong? Do all A630s really support the 850 band? Because T-Mobile is now allowing roaming on the 850 band, it would be very useful to have a quadband phone. Given what happened the first time, I'm a bit hesitant to try again without some idea of what I might have done wrong.

FYI, I've read just about everything I could find on this subject. I did the editing using a OEM Motorola USB cable on a Dell laptop running Win XP. I used the p2ktools program, ver. 0.8.6, build 406, from p2ktools.motofan.ru.

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

Paul T.

Posted by: huck-guai

the phone does support 850......perhaps it just take some time searching for the initial 850 band when you turn on the phone. How long did you wait.

if you enable field test on your phone you can see whether the phone is using 850 or just camping on it

Posted by: sendpaulmailat

huck-guai:

Thanks for the reply. The trouble is not that the phone doesn't find the 850 band -- I'd actually have to drive out to a rural area to find an 850 tower -- it is that the phone never finds ANY band to connect to. It never finds the regular 1900 T-Mobile band that it connected to moments before I did the seem edit. All it does is search for a network.

On your second point, how do I enable field test on the phone?

Thanks.

--Paul

Posted by: sendpaulmailat

A little while ago I posted a question about seem editing my Motorola A630 to enable the quad band feature. I was having problems and asked for help. Since then I've got it to work. To help any others who may have the same problem, I thought I'd post what I did and why I was unsuccessful at first.

When I ran into difficulties, I was trying to download the seem into one of the seem editing programs, edit what I downloaded in the program, and then send it back to the phone. That did not work (and crashed the phone, to boot). What did work was to save the seem to a file on my PC, and then open that file with a hex editor (XV132), make the corrections, save them to a file, and then upload the file to the phone. That worked.

Initially, all I edited was seem 0025_0001, offset 0, so that bits 0, 1, and 3 were all checked. This alone looked like it turned on the 850 band. I later went ahead and edited seem 0032_0001, offset 50, so that bit 0 was checked, but I'm not sure that was necessary. I did so because I was making changes to seem 0032 to enable the "web sessions" menu option on my T-Mobile phone and decided to be thorough.

I am happy to report that I now can roam on the 850 band.

By-the-way, before any of this took place, I had to order a genuine Motorola USB cable and use a Windows XP computer because my older computer wouldn't recognize my phone or load all the necessary drivers. Also, it had trouble with the brand-X cable I had. If you're having trouble getting your PC to see your phone or load drivers, these problems might be the result of your older PC or cable.

--Paul