[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam Software Upgradin] jpogge:
Jixxie is correct, I mistook the silver circle with the black dots on the bottom of page 8 (pdf 3 of 22) for the wilan and blue tooth rf jacks, The one on top is clearly the wilan rf test connector, and the one on the bottom is now more obviously a standoff mounting stud for what looks like part of the camera assembly,, sorry I thought it was the blue tooth rf test jack and started looking at the one on the back. I owe you all a pint.

The GPS LNA assembly I was talking about was internal to the RFR6250 there are 2 a pre LNA and a post LNA, the output of the pre LNA is available externa; to the chip for the addition of a band pass filter.

See the link below, it is of an older baseband chip with the same RF parts, and more detail...

http://www.cdmatech.com/download_library/pdf/diagram_msm6250_cs.pdf

What we are looking for, around the RFR6250 is a wide trace,surrounded on both sides with a ground plane" a coplanar wave guide" that has a close patch of 3-4 resistor/capacitors, immediately connected back into the RFR6250, and then next to it another simular clump of components. This would be the band pass filters between the LNA's . This signal although amplified is still 1.5 GHz and needs to have very short paths and close pads for the SMT to avoid parasitic oscillations, if we find this it should lead us directly to the GPS antenna.

I still dont believe the GSM antenna is shared, the diplexer and antenna switch will have an insertion loss between 1.5 and 3 db which will squelch any gps signal before it starts every time there is a switch action. The data sheet from Qualcomm claims GPS is capable simultaneous with speech and telephony, so the GPS antenna would have to be seperate.

I would suppose given the spec on the triquint part ,that it is the UMTS Power Amp, The Black square I hoped was the SAW filter is the BRF6150, I am a registered DSP developer with TI so I checked with my texas instruments FAE (field application engineer) , I might have a datasheet soon, There is a varient of this part with an FM radio, but this doesnt seem to be it, probably the source of the rumor for the FM radio being a posibility. The newer larger versions all have this FM capability , My nokia phone has one of these so I will crack the lid this weekend and check it out.

Thanks for the pictures Bimboy, the RF jack is a type U.FL which is fast becoming the industry standard in handhelds for wifi, bluetooth and GPS. I would not have you risk your PDA if you are uncomfortable. Most shields have a cover that snap on, you can see the "rails" in the FCC pictures. Some have a few blobs of solder just under the rim, if you see these it is best to use a hot air soldering iron to attempt removal, other wise , we can wait for a bricked unit.

Lastly a friend of mine who has worked on Qualcomm designs put me on to the open source SDK for the MSM chip sets from qualcomm, this may well have been known, I signed on a s a developer today and downloaded the code. version 3.1, it includes the fuction calls and code for the aGPS used on all of the new MSM chips. The system includes instructions for generating DLLs and romable code for the MSM ARM processors mostly for use as a stand alone phnoe core, but the MSM67xx family is included, not a bad idea to offload the telephony to a second processor, from the Window mobile core. either way I'm hoping the SDK will have some insight into the functioning of the GPS and its initialization. The MSM stands for "mobile set modem" so all data paths can be set up as serial streams, I.E. any peripheral can be assigned a virtual com under WIndows.

The link for the SDK is below,

http://brew.qualcomm.com/brew/en/