I have been readin the forums and the various threads about GPS, 6.1, REV A, etc, and I decided to give it a go. After a few trials I now have a fast locking GPS phone on the BELL Canada network. Whoo Hoo!
I would like to thank everyone on the forum for all the information, especially Old Man Jenkins for his custom Bell rom.
Tips:
1. Flash the radio but don't hit the screen to start anything when it boots up. Windows can active sync without the today screen being open.
2. You can flash back to the original rom, just have to use coke 0.40. Any time I like I can get back to what my phone was like when I bought it. I did this 5 times successfully.
3. If anything goes wrong, losing your data connection, etc, you can reactivate your phone to restore your internal settings, using ##your msl# after doing a reset via ##786#, this clears everything including your phone number, msid and sid/nam . Check epst in your windows folder for your sid/nam and any other info before starting flashing, just in case you need it at some time. The phone number and msid are identical unless you ported your number in.
GPS: What works well for me on Bell.
I am using radio 3.37.15 with OMJ's custom Bell rom. It has gps today, but not the most recent version with geo tagging. This may or may not be important. I have it working now and I didn't want to mess with it by installing it to see.
I installed the boot loader 2.31, flashed the radio, didn't let it customize, flashed OMJ's custom rom. Tried GSP Viewer and it was detecting com4 as being a gps but nothing really happening. So, in and of itself, just flashing to OMJ's custom bell rom didn't succeed in getting gps to work. Remember, I am talking about Bell, not Sprint.
This is what did the trick for me:
I extracted all the files from PPST_080407_7500_SPCS_2.03.sa.CAB, renamed them to their original names by looking in _setup.xml. I tried just copying ppst.exe to the windows folder, however it is just an installer, without data it does nothing. I had tried just installing the cab, but I didn't like the fact that my today screen turned blue, I didn't know what else it was doing.
So I copied these files to my windows folder:
Default.ppst
PPST.exe
WriteDMData.exe
DMData00.DAT
and
Customize.lst
which just contains full path links to the previous files. Probably not needed since the reference to PPST.exe is in the file and I doubt it would run itself via a list. But that is what I did, probably not 100% ideal, but it worked.
Then I ran ppst.exe from windows and it allowed me to update. it restarted the phone and then I did a test with gps viewer, within 10 seconds I have 5 satelites. I tried gps today and it worked immediately. My PRI did not change, btw, as far as I can tell via epst, but it did something to get GPS up to full speed.
Hope this general information will encourage other Bell users to try this out, more details about the above can be found by searching the forums.
Thanks again!