maebach

HI there,

First off I want to thank this forum for being a great help when I was rooting my HTC Desire. My question is whether I need to upgrade my radio or not. When I am in class or in some buildings I notice that my signal strength is not as good as my old BB9780 or my friends who have iphones. Does this mean my radio is not working to the best of its abilities? Or does the Desire naturally have a bad radio in comparison to these phones? I googled radio for leedroid 2.5 but most results were for leedroid 2.3 or 2.2.

All help is appreciated

Thanks!

Hadron

What radio do you have?

Any Froyo radio is compatible, so you don't need a different radio. Some people claim that changing radio affects reception, but I've never found it to make much difference myself. But there are a lot of variables here, so that does not mean that it might not help you. It may just be a hardware difference between handsets though.

Also, are these real differences, e.g. being unable to make a call where another handset on the same network can, or just a matter of "how many bars"? There is no common scale for signal bars, so differences in that may mean nothing at all.

__________________

maebach

5.11.05.27

Often times I'll be in a room with other people on the same or different networks and I won't be able to send/receive text messages because I dont have reception but they would be able to send/receive. They would also be able to surf the web but I wouldn't get 3G service. The arrows under the 'H' would not be white

maebach

Anyone?

Hadron

The thing is, it's hard to say. Some people have reported improvements in signal reception or battery life from changing radio, but I've never seen it make much difference. There's no "best" radio for everyone, it depends on a lot of factors (more than just the ROM, I'm afraid - most "recommendations" of radios for ROMs aren't based on very much in reality).

Given your experience you could try. The most recent is 5.17.05.23, so that would be as good a choice as any, but I cannot promise that it will make a difference.

Be careful flashing radios. Always check the md5 of the download, and if you flash it as a zip through recovery (the only option if you are S-On) I recommend checking the md5 of the file after copying it to your phone's card (Android File Verifier from the market is good for this). This is because a corrupt radio is a true brick, i.e. nothing you can do without expensive specialist equipment, so you want to be sure the file is intact before flashing.

Otherwise, the thing you need to know about flashing radios is never to interrupt the process once started (for the reason above). When flashing from recovery, the actual install occurs when you reboot the phone, and it will reboot itself a few times during this, so don't panic when this happens and do not pull the battery, just let it do its stuff.
If there's anything you are unsure about, ask before doing it.

If you are S-Off it's better to flash via fastboot (see the adb and fastboot FAQ), and it's essential to use fastboot rather than recovery if you've modified the memory table and have a cache partition less than 30MB in size. I expect that warning doesn't apply if you are using LeeDroid, but just wanted to be safe.

GrenW

You don't need one but it 'may' help.

I ran several version of LeeDroid, some older than yours, some newer. All with an older radio that the one you are using. I then switched to Redux and still used the older radio.

In fact I never updated my radio once, I was still on the FroYo one that Vodafone OTA's to me around 18 months ago. Maybe I could have flashed a better one but I never felt then need outweighed the (slight) risk.

I also think you're mixing up your version numbers. The 2.2 and 2.3 you quote are the Android version numbers not the LeeDroid ones. Confusingly Lee has a slightly different numbering system. The 2.x versions are FroYo and the 3.x versions are Gingerbread. I think the last FroYo version was 2.7.

Last edited by GrenW; February 2nd, 2012 at 02:33 AM.