aircard not coming out of 'dormant' state?

[Scott Bell]

OK, I've had to fight this battle on the last two chases and it's becoming obvious that tech support at Alltel is clueless.

I have the KPC680 and while chasing am running GRLevel 3. As is expected, the card will go into a dormant status pretty quickly but then when GRLevel attempts to update, it often won't come out of that state. Sitting at home, It will miss the first update attempt, but usually during the 60 second delay which GR has, the card will come out of dormancy and then GR can update (assuming it doesn't go back into the dormant state too quickly)

Anyone else had to fight this beast? Here are the things I've tried:

-adding a connection string to the modem properties
-uninstalling/installing ad nauseum
-unattaching/reattaching card and antenna
-pulling what little hair I have left out

 

[David Wolfson]

Scott, I had a different aircard up till last season -- similar issue, but a longer wait to dormancy. My ad hoc solution on the road was to browse a site with a heartbeat -- e.g. an internet radio station. That's a bit of overkill and uses a chunk of bandwidth on a 1X connection. Browsing the EVDO Forum (a great resource for aircard users!), it seems this is a rather old and recognized problem with this and many other aircards. It no longer seems to be an issue for me with the CTR-500 router and newer aircard.

The work-arounds are varied but the most straightforward is a variant on my ad hoc one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115?id=115
Find someone's simple "Coming soon..." web page or make your own blank one to hit on and you should be keeping the connection live without using much bandwidth.

 

[Randall Cooper]

Scott, Ive started changing my prl settings, try this site http://www.the-answerman.com/sidlist/prl/index.asp and install a few of those, experiment with each one when you are out chasing, alot of them work fine. Personally, I use 40044 more times than not, it has great coverage, likewise i also use 40048, those 2 are the ones that work with best coverage right now IMHO. I did notice they have a new one 40049, however thats been added within the last day because I did not see it there yesterday. You can download that one and try it(usually the most recent one works better than past entries, but I usually wait to download them to hear from other users how it works before I myself use it... actually, dude whatever, i'm gonna try the latest one and I'll let you know how it works in a PM or something. Anyways, that is what I would try if I were you. Just PM me if you have any trouble figuring out how to activate a new prl. Hope it helps!

Edit: Oops, I forgot to say how to do it, lol. Go into your Alltel Quicklink Mobile box, press Ctrl-D, password is 000000, activation code is 000000, go to the prl box, click the "..." thing and click on one of the prl's you downloaded.

Other Edit: new prl of 40049 seems to be working fine so far, will let you know if I dont think its working well anymore.

Another Edit: wow!!! This 40049 prl is working beautifully!!! I think this is the best one ive had yet! I'm on 1x and my internet is moving practically at rev-a speed! definitely the best one ive had yet! Just thought I'd let you guys know.
PM me if you have any trouble with it!

 

[Mikey Gribble]

This absolutely killed me on Friday chasing by Wichita. I chase for a tv station so I was streaming live video back to them. My video would cut out every five minutes without fail. On top of streaming video I was also on spotternetwork, which is how the station tracks our location and of course that would quit as well.
I was only 15 miles west of Wichita and had a very strong signal, so it's not like that should have been an issue. I would pull up my stream to make sure my camera was aimed right and realize it had stopped again. I would have to close out my internet, streaming software and spotternetwork and then go back through and restart everything. I don't know what the deal is or why it was doing it, but I was beyond a little pissed off about it.

Which brings me to a second topic. I used to use wilson trucker cell antennas with my phones and they worked great. Now I bought a wireless amplifer (I leave the brand out, but it is probably the most popular one on stormtrack) and I swear to god it doesn't do a damn bit of good, especially on my air card. I can turn the amp on and off and there is no difference in the bars I'm showing.
I've talked to a lot of people about this and they've said those wireless amps will help your phone signal but won't do much for your air card. Would I be better off going with a big external wilson trucker antenna for my aircard instead of using the amp?
On the signal going dormant thing if you could post a link to a good site to use to keep your connection from going dormant I would appreciate it.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I had some isolated issues with this using my Alltel aircard. In addition to that, there would be some random 'bad towers' that would give me a invalid username/password error. Once I drove about 10 miles down the road, it would work. Quicklink Mobile seems to be a little flaky anyway. When I started up the connection, I would always have to close Quicklink and re-insert the aircard once or twice before it would recognize it ('device not inserted' error).

Since I started using the Cradlepoint router last year, I've not had any of those problems. That little router really seems to manage the aircard well, much better than the Quicklink software.