10 Mar
2019
10 Mar
'19
10:32 p.m.
Craig wrote:
Firmwares are made for boards, not chips, and there is no such thing
as "a good firmware" which you could just "track down". You cannot
take fw built for one board and expect it to work on a different board,
so if the makers of the Fernvale have not made a customized version of
MTK's firmware specifically for their board in the same way how I
maintain my own version of TI-based fw specifically for my FCDEV3B,
then you are basically screwed on their hw, and won't have any way of
testing if their RF hw even works.
[RF testing and calibration]
I do have a Racal Instruments 6103E GSM Digital Radio
Test Set which seems to
work well so far.
Sorry, I don't have any experience with that instrument, and therefore
won't be able to tell you whether or not it would make an acceptable
substitute for a CMU200. The CMU200 is the only instrument I have
first-hand experience with.
Another
question: is there any way to run any official MTK-based
firmware, however non-free and blob-laden it may be, on Fernvale hw?
Probably. I know from reading that Bunnie and Xobs who designed fernvale did
run standard firmware/OS on some similar 6260 based devices. Maybe we could
track down a good firmware and test on fernvale. I don't have any clue about these details. Will
have to rely on Harald or
maybe inquire of Bunnie and Xobs.
My guess is that they probably skipped all RF test and calibration
steps which all standard GSM MS manufacturers are required to do, and
just ship completely untested RF hardware.
This Fernvale is the most misguided hardware project I have ever seen,
and I have seen a lot of dumb ideas in my professional career of about
20 y so far.
M~