Radio calibration

[osavill]

I've posted before but I wasn't very clear. Basically what I want to know is are they any tools available for checking the calibration / performing calibration of the E2 radio. It is vital that mobile handset radios are correctly calibrated. I am seeing two symptoms indicative of an uncalibrated radio - signal strength going up and down like a yo-yo and very fast battery drain. Usually Flash download tools have the ability to erase everything including the cal areas. I have no idea if the Flash tool I used has done this or not but I would like to find out. I have access to the necessary RF gear, all I lack are the Moto tools.

Thanks,

[osavill]

Ok, so I'm guessing that no one here knows about radio calibration :-)  Could be one reason so many people are reporting really bad battery life! Sadly I don't know any one at Moto and Google doesn't bring anything up :-(

[u4ia24]

Sorry, but i think you're right and no one here knows about radio calibration. But it would really be awesome if you could inform us more about this topic. Would you mind sharing some information about it?

If i understood your post correctly, stock phones that have never been flashed has correct radio calibration? And when you flash another firmware on to it, the radio settings gets messed up and will result in fluctuating signal strength and low battery life? Am i right? Or does every phone, vanilla or modified, has wrong calibration and they all need to be calibrated?

What other Motorola phones/cellphones can be calibrated successfully in your experience? Will calibrating the phone give back a significant improvement (battery life/ signal strength, etc?)

Thank you! If you shed some light about this topic, I'm sure a lot of people will be intrigued and more people will research into radio calibration.

[exeter]

 "no one here knows about radio calibration" you right , but on russian forum www.motofan.ru people find many ways to solve this problem, and I found how to solve this problem...but I haven't time to write a manual, and we found a program for e2 which work with ultimate box, but we need to study how it works and what can we do with that programm what kind of operations we can do...
P.S. Sorry for my bad english.

[osavill]

So basically, there will possibly be increased power consumption due
1) more Tx Power than the network requests
2) more handovers when the ME mis-reports how loud the BS is.

Amplifier gains vary across the bands and these all need to be calibrated to avoid the above scenarios. If the radio is "shouting" the network will request it to lower its power output. However, if the radio is mis-calibrated this could result in a ping-pong effect. Very often an uncalibrated radio will result in call drops as well.

u4ia - you're spot on. In theory every radio needs to be calibrated individually to get the very best from it. However, this is not practical! So a best average calibration is determined and every handset gets that calibration. This calibration sets the various amplifier gain levels etc.. When flashing a 'phone you should always capture the Radio Cal data so it can be flashed back. However, none of the Moto tools I've seen give this option. You also need to know where the cal data is so you can determine which mapping address and image(s) are going to affect it. If you're going to calibrate a 'phone from scratch you'll need an Agilent or a CMU or equivilant to calibrate on different bands. It's complicated! However, I did come across a "locked" Moto website that seemed to indicate that the Radio Cal data was in there. If you can get hold of stack data then that's good enough assuming Moto did the job right in the first place!

exeter - your info sounds cool, great stuff. Please keep us posted. Thanks