Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

No, some of these entries change the power/gain of the radios themselves. If you fry your radio, you fry your radio. No amount of flashing will fix failed hardware. Careful those who are changing the values to 1, you're operating the radios at full power. Areas where you truly don't get any service, the phone will be trying *really* hard to get a signal, and without a hard limit of when to stop, it'll go till it cooks itself.

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

THANK you so much

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

Ill be the guinea pig to see how long the radio lasts lol..

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

Okay, first off, I just reflashed my radio and it did not change the settings back. So please, if you're going to change these values, document every single thing you do and how to change it back, because there is no (to my knowledge) reset hard enough to revert these.

On another note, I drove home from work today with all the values at 1. I got the same dead spots I usually do. Signal strength was great, but the phone still couldn't find an active set. Moreover, the phone has been acting generally weird: the signal strength meter flashes between four bars and none, I occasionally hear the "connection established" sound when I shouldn't, and there were several times when the fields in the HDR section of FieldTrial showed completely garbage values.

As I suspected, grabbing noise and making the phone think it's a signal is probably not helping anything, and as others have said, it may be hard on the radio. I'm going back to my defaults now. That was fun while it lasted.

Next time I plan on visiting a known dead spot, I might try it again.

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

More speculation - I am not an RF engineer, these are just my random thoughts:

I don't think these values are changing the "radio power" as we think they are. Here's why:

1. I tried setting the values to 1 and got very high signal strengths (-70dBm and higher). I then tried setting the values to 65535 and also got very high signal strengths (this time as high as -20dBm). If both ends of the scale produce high signal strengths, this could not be a linear setting of power.

2. Battery consumption does not seem to change with these values. If more power was being sent to the radio, power consumption would go up.

3. The output power of the radio is definitely unaffected by these values as that is actually decided by the tower.

After reading about CDMA in general, some things I've learned:

1. "VGA" means Variable Gain Amplifier; it's job is to take RF signals from the antenna and amplify the carrier band while discarding signals outside that band.

2. RX power measures the total amount of RF energy coming out of the VGA, inside or outside the carrier band.

3. Ec/Io is the important number; it is the ratio of carrier signal to total amount of RF energy.

I'm not sure what "offset" means in this context, but I can make an educated guess; when I change these values from their defaults, RX power goes up or down. In general, small changes seem to decrease RX power, while larges chanes seem to increase it. In both cases, Ec/Io becomes worse or at best remains the same. Therefore, I believe these values are somehow controlling the bandwidth of amplficiation by the VGA. In other words, they decide what part of the incoming signal will be kept and what will be discarded. Insane values such as 1 and 65535 probably make the window very large, hence the large signal strength.

Due to electrical differences between phones, these values are probably calibrated at the factory to focus on the carrier band.

Source for most of the above: http://www.cdmaonline.com/interactive04/flash.html

Oh, and according to the folks at XDA, a ##786# will reset these values to their defaults.

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

All i can say is wow, lol.

-s

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

Good info. Appears that we may not get much out of the tweak huh? Anyone else try?

-s

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

So, are there optimal values to set, or is that phone specific?

Re: Nice hack to increase signal strength
 

I wrote down my default values and then halved each of the readings. That worked well for me. Rx Power went from high -90's to high -80's on both Ev & 1X by halving the default values. It now shows Ev in my livingroom consistently with 3-4 bars where it used to bounce back and forth between Ev & 1X and one bar. I can actually watch a pretty smooth SprintTV in my apartment now. Thanks to all the contributors of this thread!