[Ovmsdev] SIMCom diagnostics

[Tom Parker]

Hi,

I've been experiencing poor cellular connectivity with my v3.0 
prototype. The changes Mark made a while ago to recover from various 
corner cases improved things a lot but outside my house it is often 
disconnected even though my cell phone has reasonable signal strength. I 
tried to extract extra information from the modem and also force it to 
use 2G since my OVMS v2 is rock solid in the same location on the same 
carrier. I learnt some things:

I'm using the possibly slightly out of date 
https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5360/SIMCOM_SIM5360_ATC_EN_V0.24.pdf 
which doesn't require a login to get.

Sending AT+CNMP=13 is documented to force it to use 2G, but instead it 
puts the modem into a boot loop. It does the START +CPIN: READY dance 
ending with PB DONE and then goes back to START. It never responds to 
the first AT commands we send it, and power cycling does not fix it. I 
went down many rabbit holes to fix this, it looks a lot like not enough 
power (I'm powering via USB) but adding 13V to the CAN bus port didn't 
fix it. Removing the simcard fixed it, but this supported the power 
theory which turned out be wrong. Sending AT+CNMP=2 as soon as it sends 
START does result in OK and pust it back into auto mode and stops the 
boot loop.

I spent a while hacking simcom.cpp to send commands of my choice to the 
modem, but got tired of that and thought, there _must_ be a way to do 
this interactively! I traced the tx code paths and found that there are 
two ways:

simcom tx AT+CNMP?
simcom muxtx 3 AT+CNSMOD?

You probably need at least verbose logging to see the responses. You 
need to use muxtx when in mux mode. I'm not 100% sure what muxtx does 
not in mux mode.

After I sorted out the modem boot loop I added polling of AT+CPSI? and 
hooked the result up to a metric (and also logged it). I can see which 
cell tower I am connected two and on what frequency and protocol, below 
is it switching cell id and frequency:

I (26562395) simcom: CPSI: +CPSI: WCDMA,Online,530-01,0x0778,xxx,WCDMA 
IMT 2000,306,10588,0,9.0,95,24,20,500
I (26592445) simcom: CPSI: +CPSI: WCDMA,Online,530-01,0x0778,yyy,WCDMA 
900,62,3086,0,5.0,94,27,21,500

Obviously smashing all of that into one metric isn't a great thing to 
do, and probably not all of it is needed in metrics? The cell 
identifier, protocol and frequency look useful. Simcom's documentation 
for this says

If camping on a 2G cell:
+CPSI:<System Mode>,<Operation Mode>,<MCC>-<MNC><LAC>,<Cell 
ID>,<Absolute RF Ch Num>,<RxLev>,<Track LO Adjust>,<C1-C2>
If camping on a 3G cell:
+CPSI:<System Mode>,<Operation Mode>,<MCC>-<MNC>,<LAC>,<Cell 
ID>,<Frequency Band>,<PSC>,<Freq>,<SSC>,<EC/IO>,< RSCP 
 >,<Qual>,<RxLev>,<TXPWR>

I'm not sure what else is useful to parse into metrics? Maybe the 
network numbers for roaming? See page 140 of the pdf mentioned above for 
more details.

I haven't yet used this information to try to tell what is wrong with my 
poor connectivity problem.

I also discovered that the modem is not stable powered by USB on my 
desk. It disconnects from the cell network or reboots every few minutes. 
It has been stable for many hours since I turned the 13.5V power supply 
back on.