[MDA, XDA, 1010 General] magness:
I posted this message at www.pdaphonehome.com but I thought I might give it a shot here and see if I can get diffrent results.

I'm in Sydney Australia and have recently puchased (brand new.. not off of ebay or anything) the O2 XDA (32/64mb). Rom version is 3.14.17 ENG with a Radio version of 4.16 and have encountered the dreaded SIGNAL LOSS / REAQUISITION problem.

I switched from a Treo 270 (which had the dreaded back light problem) and absolutely LOOOOOOVE the XDA (plus the fact that I can code VB apps for it too is kinda nice without paying for the dev env) aaannnyway....

(is it me or does it seem like most PDA-Phones have at least one Dreaded Problem).

I'm currently with a carrier which has almost no signal at my workplace (vodafone) and am at least 12 months away from my contract ending so swapping carriers to the better Optus or Telstra is a no-no.

I've managed to trawl around and managed to find some information on the Signal loss / reaquisition.

1) The phone takes an awfully long time to reaquire a signal after coming back from an area with almost no signal. I've managed to time it and on average it seems to take about 10-15 minutes to reaquire. It also needs a STRONG signal to reaquire it and will take longer to reaquire if it's a weak signal.

2) Occasionally the phone gets "stuck" and while it reports a full strength signal, no-one can seem to call or send SMSs

I've tried to use "Phone Today" and it does seem to make little or no diffrence in my situation.

From what other sites (as well as this one) have reported, it has something to do with people only in fluctuating areas of signal combined with a long refresh interval on the phone rather than a defective phone. Am I right?

What I'd like to know (throught your wealth of contacts) is the following.

1) Is O2 Aware of this problem? I've seem forum postings where O2 have admitted to it. Can anyone confirm this? I managed to contact O2 Australia and they've denied (surprise surprise) any knowledge of the problem. Mind you I'm not sure how prevalent the XDA is in Aus so the guy on the phone may have been genuinely ignorant of the problem)

2) Can anyone confirm whether O2 is working on a patch or update for this. I know an ETA is too much to expect but some acknowledgement would be nice.

3) I understand that the AT&T SX56 is practically the same machine and it has it's refresh rate set to 90 seconds as opposed to o2 which I'm assuming is every christmas (but only if you feed it cookies). Would fixing the problem be as simple as using the radio rom from an AT&T on a XDA?

4) Is there anyway to hack the radio to up it's refresh rate? (might breach some copyright laws ... apologies if I've stepped on anyone's toes)

5) Is it true that when it tried to reaquire a signal, it goes into a high frequency seach mode (or something like that.. I don't know.. *sigh* :) ) which chews up more power? Does this mean that if a more frequent refresh rate were to be implemented, the battery life would decrease significantly?

**new addition**

Since I do have a little knowledge about emVB may be a temporary solution might be possible if I could code one.

Is there an API / for the GSM component of the phone. I noticed the "register on network" button seems to force the phone to reaquire the network if there isn't any signal. I would be nice to write an app to detect a "no bars" status on the phone and get it to hit the refresh button (or at least call the function) every minute or so until it finds a signal.

Any hints?

I may be hoping for a little too much here but it never hurts to try right? Thanks in advance.