Handset Information

The handset I acquired is a Qualcomm GSP-1600. Some folks associate Kyocera with this model; I'm not sure what if any involvement they had with it. The GSP-1600 is a tri-mode phone; it supports terrestrial cellular AMPS, terrestrial cellular CDMA (IS-95 only, not CDMA2000) in the 800 MHz band, and satellite CDMA (a slightly-modified variant of IS-95) on the Globalstar system.

Globalstar Network Information

I'll put some stuff here sometime.

Notes on the Globalstar Network

On 2 February 2013, at 7:00 p.m. EST (UTC-5), Globalstar satellite M071 (NORAD ID 31576) passed high in the sky over my location. For a several-minute window it was the only post-2000 Globalstar satellite visible from my location, yet my handset went into "no service" mode instead of receiving a signal via this satellite. This seems strange to me; I thought all of the Globalstar satellites launched between 2007 through the present were fully operational. M071 will be almost directly overhead tomorrow around 5:00 p.m. and I will be curious to find whether I see a signal from it then.

Experiments

This is a video of the GSP-1600 in Engineering (Debug / Field Test) mode during a Globalstar satellite call. It shows the changing Satellite ID, Spot Beam ID, and SNR values as the call hands off between spot beams and satellites.

Here is a video of the GSP-1600 in cellular mode (activated on Page Plus, a reseller of Verizon Wireless service), placing calls to various numbers through a Verizon Network Extender. There is a curious nine second delay between when the call "goes through" on the network and when the audio starts on these calls.

I am working on a mapping between NASA's satellite IDs for the Globalstar satellites and the satellite IDs that show up on the handset in debug mode. The spreadsheet containing these mappings is currently quite incomplete.