[Devon Johnson]

Nevermind, I ended up finding your reply regarding the Nordic characters…

For completeness, here’s a quote of your reply:

“1. In SMS Settings menu, check “Enable PDU Mode” and click save.

2. In SMS Settings menu, change the ASCII 7 bit character set to “3GPP 23.038? and click save.

3. In SMS Settings menu, make sure Unicode and Extended ASCII are disabled, unless you plan to specify ASCII 7 bit encoding during the send.”

Thanks for the help!

[Devon Johnson]

Hi Bryon,

Reading through your reply, I’m using HTTP GET interface with my SF800s and I can only get a subset of the “special” characters out. For example, you mention above about the linefeeds and carriage returns and they are all stripped out as spaces.

I tried hex encoding, but that forces Unicode which diminishes the utility (too short).

Any tips on how to enable some formatting on these messages?

For the record, I’m using the 7 bit encoding (tried the 8 bit encoding and even though the SF800 accepted the format, my phone never received it… bummer).

Thanks for any tips you might have,
Devon

[Devon Johnson]

Hi Bryon,

I agree that the iSMS “should” have detected the blank card (I’ve been advised that), but in reality, I took the “bad” card and formatted it with Windows which explicitly speaking isn’t blank. I think that I formatted it in FAT16, but I’m not sure.

So when I inserted the formatted card, the iSMS didn’t seem to format the card (I waited 30 minutes in case it was particularly slow). Had I zero-ed the card out rather than formatting the card, that may have worked.

Also, I suppose it is interesting that since I copied the image, I know have a working default image sitting on my hard drive for future uses in case I need to reset another card.

Either way, if people are throwing out “bad” CF cards they might try this trick to see if they can get a little more life.

Thanks for the help and have a good one,
Devon

[Devon Johnson]

Thought I’d post an update. After the unit not booting (Status LED dark, then lit and not continuing to blinking), I found my trusty $10 multi card reader and plugged the CF card in.

Windows didn’t like it and so I used a program to look at the files on the drive: http://www.z-a-recovery.com . After looking at a good card, I noticed the multitech banner jpg files weren’t there. Soooo…

I tried to format the drive with windows thinking the SF800 unit should detect a blank card and reformat the drive. This didn’t work even though I did a complete windows format (not quick format).

I then took a card out of a working unit and copied the contents with this program: http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
Then inserted the “bad” card and copied the contents back on to the “bad” card and tried it out. Voila! It works great.

You may also be able to achieve the same results if you do a “true” format and zero the card out, but I haven’t tried that right now.

Anyway hope that helps someone out there recover their SF400/SF800 Multitech ISMS modem if they find they have a bad Compact Flash (CF) and won’t startup.

Thanks,
Devon

[Devon Johnson]

Thanks for the advice. It looks like that was true (the unit not completely booting up). I talked to another guy who uses these and he said that the compact flash might be the issue. I took one of the other CF cards from another unit and the “failing” unit works well now.

I’ll try and track down a CF/memory card multi reader to see if there’s anything I can do to “revive” it, but it was mentioned that it’s possible that the cards can get full and it prevents the unit from starting up properly. Evidently it will only take 1GB or 2GB cards, the larger ones won’t work.

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