Engineering mode

[trixter]

I have been playing with my tmobile MDA (wizard) and in HKLM/software/HTC/engineermode there are some keys I find interesting. On mine LaunchEngineerModeAppDialStr is set to *#*#364#*#* (364 maps to 'eng' which is probably why it was chosen).

Has anyone played with this at all? I tried but I get 0 mobile srevice her eand got a message back saying 'please try you call later' (sms style) which I am certain came from the phonei tself. Normally I get just 'failed' rather than 'please try your call later'.

At any rate, it might be something fun to look at I know that some people were looking to get the tower IDs and other info, and usually engineering mode includes that.

[trixter]

I have an update to this. I have 2 SIMs both tmobile US. The old one is at least a year old, maybe more. It is totally inactive. The new one came with the phone. When I use the old one I get 'please try your cal llater' with the new one it goes into engineering mode and displays cellid and other bits of info. of course its not highly useful for me right now becuase I have no cell signal, but ...

The title bar reads 'gsm test mode' and there are 3 tabs. GSM, AMR and GPRS. At least now the key to get the dial string is known, if it wasnt before (I didnt see anything) and the fact that you can get tower IDs and other stuff (something someone wanted elsewhere).

the gsm test mode app appears to be a totoally different app as well (according to start->system->memory->running programs. I do not have good tools yet to see exactly where this app is and how to access it. But I am sure that if that program were located a debugger could provide useful info on extracting the syscalls or whatever is done to get access to the cellid and other bits of info.

Note cellids can be used to track location, they are fixed and reported, at least in the US., While you may not know exactly where someone is, by knowing which tower they are on you can guess. RSSI can be used in conjunction with this as the far field (where most radio communications occur) falls off at the inverse square, you can guess at the distance (but not direction). Multipath and other issues can affect this reading, so its not highly accurate but ...

Now does anyone know of a good tool like ps in unix that shows me not only the full program name but also any arguments given for WM5? :)

[cgrillo]

An easier way is to look in your \windows dorectory and look for the "GXM Test Mode.exe" ....