Forcing datacard to choose a specific tower

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Coconut

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Here's the thing: I live in Elardus Park Pretoria. 3G HSDPA is up and down like a yo-yo here. Lately (last 2 days), even the 3G signal which is normally strong vanished.

Seeing that Ponyting is just down the road, I invested in an outside high gain LPDA antenna. Put it up on a pole, pointed around until I got a weak but steady HSDPA signal to the west (probably form a tower across the other side of the R21) and away I went. I use an aircard 850. Now the problem! Suddenly our local tower got "fixed" and the signal is full strength because I'm so close to it. But it only has 3G NOT HSDPA!! The weaker tower has HSDPA which I want. Whenever I connect, of course, my system automatically chooses the strongest local signal (which is not the fastest!!)

Is there a way to force the 850 card to select the weaker tower? Or software perhaps available that will list all towers being received by me and allow one to specifically choose a tower to connect? I'm praying for our local 3G tower to crash so I can connect to the faster HSDPA more distant one again! Help!
 
I had exactly the same problem and spent ages on the line to the helpdesks, without any luck, and on a bad day my datacard will unfortunately select the slower of the towers in my vicinity without my being able to do anything abot it.

I did find however that once I put in a dedicated data antenna from Poynting, pointing (sorry....) precisely at the 'better' tower, this tends to happen less often. The only case where that shouldn't help would be if both your towers are in roughly the same direction, which would be unusual....
 
Coconut said:
Is there a way to force the 850 card to select the weaker tower? Or software perhaps available that will list all towers being received by me and allow one to specifically choose a tower to connect?
Click to expand...
Not as far as I know. Unless Sierra Wireless are forthcoming with some software trick, your only hope is to use a highly directional antenna and position it so that the signal from the further tower appears stronger.
Of course it won't help you if the tower you want is directly behind the one you don't.

Watch this space for a trick to identify the tower you are connected to, hopefully it will work with your card.
 
Terencek said:
I had exactly the same problem and spent ages on the line to the helpdesks, without any luck, and on a bad day my datacard will unfortunately select the slower of the towers in my vicinity without my being able to do anything abot it.

I did find however that once I put in a dedicated data antenna from Poynting, pointing (sorry....) precisely at the 'better' tower, this tends to happen less often. The only case where that shouldn't help would be if both your towers are in roughly the same direction, which would be unusual....
Click to expand...

...and thats what id do aswell.
 
ginggs said:
Not as far as I know. Unless Sierra Wireless are forthcoming with some software trick, your only hope is to use a highly directional antenna and position it so that the signal from the further tower appears stronger.
Of course it won't help you if the tower you want is directly behind the one you don't.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's probably your best bet. If the towers are on opposite sides of your building, putting the antenna out of sight of the "strong" tower may give you enough signal, relatively, on the weaker tower.
 
That's exactly my problem - the weaker (but hsdpa enabled) tower is in exactly the same direction as my local tower in Elardus Park that has suddenly lost hsdpa capability last week. 4 Calls to MTN dataline - they promise to get back to me but nothing ever happens.

I have a highly directional LPDA beam, but I'm so close to the local tower that no matter where I point the beam, I get full signal from the local tower - even off the back of the beam.

So I need some form of software that will allow me to log onto a specific tower id and stay on that tower.

I had a mate who worked at Vodacom as a technician years ago (he's gone now). I remember they had such software loaded into their phones that allowed them to do this and also gave the relevant dbm levels per tower. So the software is out there - I just need a kind soul at MTN to let me put it on my notebook! To give an example, when the local tower was down, the weaker faster tower was at around -90 to -100dbm. When my local tower comes up, it blows everything away with a -65 to -75 dbm sig regardless of where the directional external antenna is pointing.

Someone get me that techie tower selective software - PLEASE!!
 
Nokia handsets used to have a program that allowed to you lock onto the unique tower ID. Do we get that tower ID when using the E220 tool on this website? If so, wouldn't it be a small change to only allow connection to that specific tower ID through the tool?
 
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