Kindle pinging outside servers, getting signal strength

[archivator]

This is sort of a bizarre question. At one of my side projects we use a lot of 3G networking (various providers, various devices). Long story short, we'd like to know if there's a way to turn a Kindle into a sort of universal mapping device.

At the very least, we'd like to be able to run a daemon (this part is easily achieved) that logs the signal strength in dBm (not sure where to get it from but we could always reverse engineer the original software) and average latency to a known server over a certain time period (this is the part that we're pretty much convinced can't be done).

If we could make this, we could then force the provider from the diagnostic menu and map an area by going on a predefined route.

In our brief experiments with a jailbroken Kindle running usbnet, we couldn't send/receive anything from the shell over ppp0, only over usb0. Can this even be done? I realize what we're asking for is borderline a violation of ToC but the amount of data transmitted would be a couple of hundred bytes/minute and the information would be invaluable..

[Xqtftqx]

Originally Posted by archivator

This is sort of a bizarre question. At one of my side projects we use a lot of 3G networking (various providers, various devices). Long story short, we'd like to know if there's a way to turn a Kindle into a sort of universal mapping device.

At the very least, we'd like to be able to run a daemon (this part is easily achieved) that logs the signal strength in dBm (not sure where to get it from but we could always reverse engineer the original software) and average latency to a known server over a certain time period (this is the part that we're pretty much convinced can't be done).

If we could make this, we could then force the provider from the diagnostic menu and map an area by going on a predefined route.

In our brief experiments with a jailbroken Kindle running usbnet, we couldn't send/receive anything from the shell over ppp0, only over usb0. Can this even be done? I realize what we're asking for is borderline a violation of ToC but the amount of data transmitted would be a couple of hundred bytes/minute and the information would be invaluable..

Hi, please read my blog post about the kindles 3g. Youll need to get connect through amazons proxy.

http://xkid.biz/wordpress/?p=25

[khmann]

Get cell info direct from the modem via AT commands such as +CREG=2 and perhaps something like +xcellinfo=1.

Log it to a file, gzip it up and transfer it later when wifi is available, or to play nice with kindle 3G use http post through the proxy.

Make assumptions about signal quality this way, don't rely on ping times as there are too many other variables in the carriers network. If you must measure response time, try and do it with L2 packets like ppp lcp echo request (probably totally invisible to GSM carrier) or tcp ping the proxy, possibly using something like hping2.

If you can gather GSM Timing Advance data (immediately after successful ping) use SIMToolKit calls if nothing else, you can suppose quite accurate location data.

I would be very interested to see this combine with WiFi location data appear in a public database somewhere.

This is definately on my list as something to look into in my free time...

[khmann]

did some testing...

modemcmd -v -c "AT+CLAC" prints all the commands. I spent a lot of time and was unable to find a functional command reference for AnyData DTP-600W. I tried very hard by hand to locate any "site survey", at+cged, "gsminfo", #moni, commands but failed.

However, we have AT+CSIM which seems functional, so we can gather information from simcard. Basically you have to send a PDU to the card and read it's response. I think this thread have all we need: http://forum.gsmhosting.com/vbb/archive/t-75839.html it's an old one, but about half way down the page, we get this gem:

Request Network Measurement Info:
AT^SSTK=22,0
> D009810301260282028182 [Ctrl-Z]

surrounding documentation is very nice also. obviously we don't have ^SSTK but shouldn't +CSIM get us to the same place?

I have confirmed this technique working on iPhone2/3gs in the past but I don't yet have minicom on K3 to test; and I can't get it to go with 'modemcmd'.