The purpose of this site is to give you an overview of all question which are helpful for us to find a solution of the support issue.
Contact information
If a problem regarding the USB-connect-LPWA product appears, please contact our support:
Email: support@exelonix.com
Phone: +49 351 219 71 448
In order to find the solution for your problem, please try to answer the following questions in your support request.
In order to take care of your support issue, the three questions should be always answered.
Please give us a detailed problem description. Hereby, information about time until the problem occurred or reproducibility should be included.
For supporting you, we need a description of target application and information whether the hardware integration manual was considered or not.
To follow-up the configuration history of the device, we need information about the configurations which have been done in the past.
If you have problems to establish an USB connection to the device please answer the following questions.
In windows 10, the device should be automatically detected as Data Only device as shown in the figure below.
VODEXL is recognized by Windows 10 as a data only device
See the trouble shooting part for NB-EASY
The VODEXL has two serial ports. However, only one port can be used for serial communication between host and device.
The other port is for diagnostic purposes only.
The serial port can be easily tested by sending an AT command to the modem.
In order to establish a serial connection to the device, it is important to use the following serial interface configuration:
Baud rate: 115200
Data bits: 8
Stop bits: 1
Parity: none
To establish a connection to the Vodafone network, the modem of the device has to access the SIM chip.
The functionality of the SIM chip can be tested as shown below.
The SIM chip profile has to be activated by Vodafone, otherwise the device will be rejected (+CEREG: 2,3) by network.
The following figure shows an example of a scenario when the SIM chip profile is activated (+CEREG: 2,5).
The number of bands and channels are directly addressed by MNO profiles. Hence, to connect to Vodafone network, the right MNO profiles have to selected.
The available Vodafone profiles on VODEXL are:
19 (Europe)
197 (Global)
For the selecting the right profile see the code examples
The RF performance of the device highly depends on the right installation. Therefore, make sure that the application follows the instruction in the hardware manual.
The properties of the radio connection to the Vodafone network can be tested by the following AT Commands.
+RSRP: the Parameter in quotation marks represent the RSRP value.
+RSRQ: the Parameter in quotation marks represent the RSRQ value.
+CSQ returns the RSSI (General Signal strength)
For an analysis of the radio conncetion only RSRP and RSRQ should be considered as shown in the table below.
Rating of RF connection | RSRP | RSRQ |
---|---|---|
Very good | -50 dBm .. -65 dBm | -3 dB |
good | -65 dBm .. -80 dBm | -4 ..-5 dB |
satisfactory | -80 dBm .. -95 dBm | -6 .. -8 dB |
sufficient | -95 dBm .. -105 dBm | -9 .. -11 dB |
unsatisfactory | -110 dBm ..-125 dBm | -12 .. -15 dB |
not sufficient | -125 dBm ..-140 dBm | -16 .. -20 dB |
In order to establish a test connection, please follow the procedure in figure below.
For an investigation of a any device instability issues, please answer the following questions.
For more information please, have a look at the hardware manual. A detailed description of the application and the hardware integration are needed.
For a detailed evaluation of the instability issues, information like mean time to failure (here shutdown) are of great interest.
Sometimes information from the network can lead to a configuration which could be misinterpreted as a shutdown (e.g. deep sleep. See power configuration for more details).
Hereby, the reason could be misconfiguration or cyclic overload of the device. For that reason, a description of the application would be necessary for a deeper investigation.
Does the device response between the shutdowns?
When the device periodically shuts down after the first attach to the network, the power save configuration could cause to a cyclic deep sleep of the device, which often is misinterpreted as cyclic shutdown.
This can be verified by disabling the power save functionality of the modem as shown below.