The other day, for no apparent reason, something went kablooey with my trusty Sprint wireless modem. Maybe it was the OS X 10.5.4 update, but who knows? For the past year plus, when I plugged the modem (it’s a Novatel Ovation U720) into a USB port on my MacBook pro, a little signal strength meter popped onto my menu bar. The meter had a drop down menu letting me connect and disconnect to the Internet.
But starting a few days ago, the menu bar meter stopped appearing when the modem was plugged in. I tried all the usual fixes — apply the 10.5.4 combo updater, zap my PRAM, fix permissions — but nothing helped. Eventually, I discovered that I could still connect to the Internet by using the networking control preference. That was kind of a pain and it lacked the signal strength measure to boot. I posted on a few forums but got no answers.
Then today, I was checking out the usual blogs and I came across a Dave Winer post about getting a wireless modem. One of the models he was considering was the U720. Someone posted a comment about its GPS capabilities. So I responded with a comment about how I love mine but that it had no discernible GPS functions, at least under the Mac. A few Google searches even turned up an official looking Sprint page saying “there is currently no support” for GPS on the U720. But on some forums it seemed like people were getting location information out of the modem.
So I dug a little deeper and discovered that at some point since I purchased the U720 from Sprint, the company has posted additional drivers and support software. I downloaded the most current driver (dated November 2007) and the latest connection manager software (dated March 2008). I followed the brightly-colored, three-page list of directions and installed the upgraded driver and then the software (called “Sprint SmartView” for some reason).
When I finally turned off my wifi connection, plugged in the U720 and started up the SmartView program I got a jolt of electricity. Sure enough, there was a whole shelf of GPS functionality. Click a button and get your current location shown on Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest. Other buttons summoned the locations of nearby coffee shops, banks, Sprint stores, restaurants, hotels and gas stations. The software is also NMEA compatible. I can barely tell you what that means but it seems to be a standard which allows the modem to feed location information to third-party hardware and software. The SmartView program window also shows signal strength, current location and upload and download speeds:
It’s all wicked cool and I feel like I got a brand new, upgraded modem for free. And it all came from the typical mixed-up, wacky cross-pollination of blogs, bulletin board posts and generally goofing around web surfing.
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