Comments on: How to Measure & Improve Mobile Broadband Reception

By: Dominic Oskis

Dominic Oskis — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:46 +0000

There are much better solutions than mucking about with Hyperterminal if you want to read the RSSI from a Huawei USB modem.

Realterm from realterm.sourceforge.net is a much more useful terminal program than Hyperterminal, it didnt take long to set it up to keep sending “AT+CSQ” to the modem every couple of seconds. It saves the fingers from dropping off. It soon became clear that the modems are very slow to report any change of signal strength, think 10-15 seconds!

I then discovered MDMA from http://www.nerve.org.za. Thats even more useful! It works fine with my E160 and E220 Huawei USB modems. You will need to close down any dialogue regarding the modems internal memory otherwise the com ports get blocked so MDMA wont be able to access the modem. It took me a good few minutes to figure that out!

You might also want to wander over to
http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/ to find the nearset 3G base site of your network, it makes setting up directional antennas much easier.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:10:15 +0000

Brian

I suspect your problem is that the terminal is not set to echo your typed input to the local terminal. Check this part of Step 3:

“Tick the box next to “Echo typed characters locally” – this will help you see the commands as you type them.”

Hope that helps

By: brian cornelius

brian cornelius — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:12:10 +0000

have followed instructions closely for setting up hyper terminal but cannot type command or anything in window ????

By: Gerry Scales

Gerry Scales — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:12:19 +0000

Anthony

Thanks for this excellent piece of work. I was struggling with getting Hyperterminal to work with my E169 until I found your guide.
I am in a poor reception area but unable to mount an external antenna. In what must seem like a strange move, I have mounted a Yagi indoors a few cm away from, and pointed at, a window. Using the RSSI numbers I have boosted the reported signal from 2 (-109 dBm) to 11 (-91 dBm).
I did this attached to a PC and then transferred the E169 to a wireless router.
My connection is now rock solid and I get quite acceptable performance (Download ~ 0.8Mbps, Upload ~ 0.2 Mbps) considering my poor location.
The biggest improvement has been in Upload speed. Together with QoS in the router, I hope that this will make it practical for occasional VoIP use.
I’d really like to know what difference the Yagi has made to the RSSI at the tower which I gather has a big impact on allocation of service during high loads.
My next step will be to try to read the RSSI while the E169 is still mounted in the router…

Thanks again – this has been a big help to me.

Gerry