[Verizon Galaxy Note 3 General] fire3element:
Yes, I know. Probably why Samsucks dropped the ball on all the Dev phones they sold. No support at all.

That said, there were a few tars to flash on the Dev phones a few years back. For sure BeansTown made one where he took the retail tar and removed the bootloader from it. That was an image for MJE though, and is long gone now.

FWIW: I did send him a PM earlier to see if he still had any images we could grab. He also should be able to answer whether or not we can flash back to MI9 now with the BL being unlocked. I will wait for his reply before moving forward.

Yes, I do believe that is correct. In fact, you should be able to go back to MI9 from NC2, if memory serves. I know that I have tried multiple things to get it back to where it was before. Nothing has helped or worked.

The only thing I have never done is do a NAND wipe with Odin. And I am fairly sure I never attempted that from TWRP either because... well, that would not be too bright with 'then' limited options for Rooting and Recovery.

Hey man, if you want to give it a swing, have at it.

I would still be using this phone today if it were not for the constant reception issues. Dropping from 4g to 3g, then 1x, all day long was causing me some problems.

Radio was just not stable at all. The GPS has been wonky as h3LL too. I am not 100% certain if it was better on MI9 or not. I think it was, but too long ago to remember.

I can tell you that I am overly careful with my devices. I am 99.9% sure the cause was not do to physical damage. I have even done quite a few analysis and part swaps with replacement phones trying to narrow down the root cause.

What I learned was that phones that were refurbished AFTER the NC2 release had better reception. The body of the phone, and the main boards were identical.

Tested 5+ replacements over the last 2-1/2 years.

If you have been around since the launch of the Note 3, you should know of the quite sizable number of complaints with signal reception after that first FW update.

Many many people got replacement devices. Some had better reception than others. The best ones seemed to be those that came pre-loaded with NC2.

That is how I came to the conclusion that it must be something wrong with one of the partitions.

The refurbs would have been sent to Samsung and completely wiped, then loaded with a clean image. That is my theory at least.

The only phone that showed me different was the last one I got my hands on. Swapping the board from phone to phone yielded a ~50% increase in reception, with a 50% reduction to the other. Really odd.

Best I could come up with was that either the Spen mesh behind the screen, or the screen itself blocked less of the signal than my launch model.

I have to say that that last one I messed with had a V E R Y low quality screen and build. It felt like a cheap chinese knock-off. That and it overheated within 15mins of turning it on, with nothing running or installed.

Sent that POS back promptly.

^^^ THIS

This is exactly what I am thinking is going on. The update from MI9 to MJ7 screwed something up in one of those partitions.

I still have no idea what the actual issue with the radio is, so I would not even know what to look for if one did take a peek inside the faulty partition.

All I have is a hunch to go by. Nothing more, nothing less.

As long as we don't brick my brick (has the ZeroLemon 10,000mAh behomoth on it LoL), I don't see the harm in trying to figure out if it is partition related.