darryl ramm's blog

I was playing with my iPAQ hx4700 running Naviter SeeYou Mobile connected over Bluetooth to the NMEA output from Silent Wings  soaring simulator on a Macintosh (see details here). While messing around with this I discovered that with Windows Mobile 2003 and ROM and firmware version 1.0 that the PDAs shipped with, that there is a bug that will case SeeYou Mobile to hang when waiting to access a Bluetooth serial device where a Bluetooth connection has not yet been made. I suspect this affects all types of Bluetooth connections, but the fix is just to do a simple upgrade to ROM and firmware version 1.10.

I had one iPAQ running Windows Mobile 2003 (with the as supplied version 1.0 ROM and firmware) and another running Windows Mobile 5.0. Selecting COM5 (the Bluetooth serial port)  as the input port for SeeYou Mobile will cause SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to hang until I started Silent Wings and it made a Bluetooth connection. On Windows Mobile 5.0 SeeYou Mobile does not hang, it just shows the “NODATA” status message in the top left of the screen. Once Silent Wings connects SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 would start running OK. The problem was if I did not have the Mac with you to start Silent Wings then  you could not get in and even change the serial port settings before SeeYou Mobile would lock up.

I don’t know if other  Windows Mobile 2003 PDAs have similar problems. To see if a PDA has his problem just turn on Bluetooth on the PDA, don’t do anything else and don’t have the PDA connected to an active Bluetooth Serial connection. Then go into SeeYou Mobile and set it to use the Bluetooth COM port (COM5 for the iPAQ hx4700, this may be different on other PDAs). If SeeYou Mobile hangs it has the problem,  if it reports “NODATA” after a short while and the user interface is still responding to to menu events etc. then the PDA does not have the problem.

Besides SeeYou Mobile and Silent Wings, I suspect this bug affects all sorts of Bluetooth serial connections on the iPAQ 4700. Anyhow upgrading the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to ROM version 1.1 and firmware update 1.1 appears to fix this problem. Software updates are available on HP’s web site.  The updates I used are available here -

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 ROM update for Windows 2003  (install this first)

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 Firmware update for Windows Mobile 2003  (we will see how long these link works)

I  certainly recommend doing these upgrades and staying with Windows Mobile 2003, and not upgrading to Windows Mobile 5.0., which is a performance dog.

BTW be sure to use a real Windows PC to flash the ROM to the iPAQ, I normally run Window XP under VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro, every time I have tried to run an iPAQ  ROM upgrade from within a VMware Fusion virual machine it will brick the iPAQ, leaving it stuck in the USB ROM loader. I’ve reported this to VMware.

It’s winter, but I’m flying out of Truckee in the Sierra Nevada mountains on an amazing day, it seems like the middle of summer. I self-launched from Truckee Airport in my new Antares 20E. I’m now around 16,000′ just South West of Truckee airport heading towards Mount Rose. I have the amazing vista of Lake Tahoe off to my right. I decide to head across the Carson valley to the Pine Nut mountains, and reach over to my PDA and change my destination waypoint to Mineral Peak, …. slap. Oh no, it’s all just a simulation.

So here is the setup. The Silent Wings soaring simulator is running on a MacBook Pro and driving a iPAQ hx4700 PDA running SeeYou Mobile. The NMEA (GPS) data to drive  SeeYou Mobile is coming from the (simulated) Cambridge 302 in the (unfortunately just simulated) Antares 20E glider I’m flying. The NMEA data is traveling over a Bluetooth serial link between the MacBook Pro and iPAQ PDA. Once set up properly all I need to do is just start Silent Wings on the Mac and SeeYou Mobile on the PDA and they just talk to each other. SeeYou Mobile works like normal, and you can even record an IGC flight trace on the PDA. But getting to this point can be a little involved. I tried  describing this to people and then realized I really need to write it down in painful detail. So sorry for the length, but here goes…

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