Playing with the Option GTM380 HSDPA card

Following on from my last post we now move to the other HSDPA card I bought. This is an Option GTM380. As I can tell its not OEM'd by anyone else like the HS2300/MC 8775 was. Option's web page was recently re-vamped and the IEMI for my card will now let me download the latest driver from Option.

You can also get the driver and software bundle from the Option AT&T support page here.

The interface is a fair bit more basic than the Sierra Watcher, but there is still all the things you need to get it working.

One thing that didn't work as I expected is that the "Autoconnect" option in the software doesnt seem to leave the card in the "Always On" state. You can go into the cards driver properties and change the Autoconnect and Auto re-connect variables to 1 which does the trick however the software client still tries to tear down the connection if you exit it. Luckily the auto-reconnect function in the driver brings the link back up.

This card has two antenna connections that are needed to support 7.2MBps, and if the weather is right you can get about 60% of that. Two antennas doesn't seem to buy much extra connectivity reliability over the MC 8775 card, however.

The one significant gripe I have with this card is its lack of compatibility with Windows, and specifically Windows 7. The card drivers fail to re-initialise after sleeping, which I would do regularly given that I commute with my laptop. The issue is covered and patched for Vista however I'm not running Vista anymore. I do hope that its fixed in later builds of 7 - I'm currently on 7077 x64.

Buying cheap MC 8775 HSPA/HSDPA/HSUPA cards on eBay

I recently bought a couple of cheap (~$120AUD, shipped) 3G cards on eBay. Both work fine however I thought that I'd post about my experiences and mention some tips for young players. I'll cover the first card, a Sierra Wireless MC8775, in this post. I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, when I have more experience with the new card I shall post about it.

I bought them to use in my new Dell E6500 laptop running Vista x64.

The first was a Sierra Wireless MC8775, however the device I received was a HP branded HS2300 unit. After trying lots of drivers, I ended up getting the slightly older HP drivers working. Searching on HP's site for HS2300 found suitable drivers, however the later ones didn't install properly for me, its possible that they are locked to HP hardware.

There are some drivers included with the Generic Watcher, too, but these only cover Sierra's own brand products.

You can download HP the driver that worked for me from here.

You then can get the Sierra Generic Watcher app from here.

If so inclined you can get later firmware using the link in this post. Ignore the Watcher and driver link, though.

The MC8775 is a HSDPA single antenna device so it only supports 3.6Mb/sec but it does get quite a good signal using either of the two antennas in the E6500, better than my iPhone on the train, for example.

You can configure the Watcher profile type to Autoconnect and to not turn off the radio on exit. This way the Internet connection is "always on". You would want to keep an eye on your ISP quota, though.

Overall I'm quite happy with Optus' coverage on my commute and based on my iPhone experience (which is also with Optus) the coverage should be pretty good out on the road as well.