Does anyone know of or has anyone designed their own 3G (or better) radio module for Gadgeteer? I have seen a ton of chips out there but nothing from GHI other than their radio module (which I believe supports only 2G). https://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/322
If anyone has designed anything I would love to hear about it. Ultimately I want to connect it to a SpiderII to replace the GHI radio module. What I am finding is that it is getting harder and harder to find 2G radio signals so the device never connects when it leaves a major city. At least this is my finding in Canada, not sure about the rest of the world.
@ NicholasR - I love these Radio’s, but be warned, they aren’t the cheapest, but are designed for the Oilfield in the middle of nowhere Canada. If your in Canada, they list the certifications for each radio.
I built my own 3G/2G modem based around the SIM5320E or A for the US market. Works well where there is 3G and falls back to 2G if there is no 3G. Finding a 3G module is difficult as most are based around quad band 2G older modems.
Adafruit also has a 3G module, based on the same core that Dave mentioned : [url]https://www.adafruit.com/products/3147[/url]
I have one of each of the Fona modules and I’ve been quite happy with them for one-off projects.
I am starting to test modules from [url]https://nimbelink.com/[/url]. They are a bit pricey but the same socket supports multiple modems and carriers. They are heavy into Verizon at the moment but they will be releasing AT&T module in a few months. They are fully carrier certified modules.
Their LTE CAT 1 module will be available in the next few month as well. They are working on a CAT M1 which is heavily geared towards the IoT market.
I have their Beagle Bone Black dev kit to test their modems. I have my eye towards a Cellular based Octavo board.
There is a very good NETMF driver with it, and you can go low power and handles location, http and other cool stuff easily. Its written by Jose Simoes which also is active on the NETMF project itself - he is a capacity!
I paid 48EUR for it, and according to Jose they are probably going for a 3G version soon.
I have tried 7 different cellular modules, and this one is the best to me.
@ njbuch - The SIM800 and SIM900 are 2G. For US customers, AT&T drops 2G service entirely starting Jan 1, 2017. T-Mobile will continue but they don’t have as much coverage as AT&T. I am not sure what the 2G situation is in other countries.
@ njbuch - thanks for the endorsement and making a public statement on how happy you are working with our NETMF driver.
These a troubled times in the mobile arena… 2G is phasing out on US and Europe too.
The rumor are that 2G is completely ending sometime next year in the US. In most European countries too.
3G support is planed to end by 2020. Both US and Europe.
Current LTE module offer is sparse, at best… LPWan technologies are emerging. GSM world is responding with NBIoT but there won’t be any support from carrier sooner than H2 2017.
The major chip providers (Qualcomm, Intel, Mediatek, etc…) are still working on chips to support NBIoT.
So everyone is kind of waiting for what will come from the chip manufacturers pipe and what the carriers are deciding to support on their networks. One can see from all this that it’s hard for module manufacturers to lock on anything right now.
We are no exception to this. Our current partner will offer a module with 3G support (for Europe only!) in the coming months. They’ll have an LTE module (Europe and US) sometime next year. So we’ll probably will be skyping 3G and jump right on LTE. It’s hard to say were all this is going to end right now…
