SUCCESS: Merlin S720 on HP zd7000 using Fedora Core 6 (FC6)

greno · EVDO Newbie Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 3 Location: USA

Notebook: HP zd7000
EVDO Card: Merlin S720
OS: Fedora Core 6 (FC6)
Carrier: Sprint

I followed this excellent post:
http://www.evdoforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=3308&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=linux

and was able to get the Merlin S720 card working.

The connection I'm sure is at 1xRTT. It's rather slow. But at least it's working.

Now if I could just tell the modem to lock on EVDO only.

I tried some old modem tricks of using minicom to talk to it:

You must be disconnected to talk to the modem:
To make this work you have to create a link from /dev/ttyUSB0 to /dev/modem
$ ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/modem

Now you can start minicom:
$ minicom

The modem should announce itself.

To get a list of parameter settings:
AT&V

Also if you want your ESN:
ATI (that's the letter I)

This link is helpful for commands:
http://www.modem.com

I'm still looking at these parameters to see what I could set.

greno · EVDO Newbie Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 3 Location: USA

Can someone using Windows and Connection Manager please go in and set their modem to EVDO only and then use a terminal program under Windows and issue AT&V to the modem and dump out the parameters and post them?

greno · EVDO Newbie Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 3 Location: USA

What I notice is that Sprint's DNS servers are painfully slow to resolve addresses.
Once they have the address then things speed right along.

Here's my bandwidth according to C|Net:

SonWon · EVDO Newbie Joined: 24 Dec 2006 Posts: 3

I may have the Novatel S720 later on this week, is your download speed still in the 400kbps range? Also, I have windows XP so I can maybe dump out the parameters. Let me know if you are still interested.

thanks,
SonWon