Hi Guys,
I know Sierra Wireless no longer supports the Aircard 850 card but unfortunately I still have to use it 
I’m hoping there is enough wisdom and experience around here to at least put me on the correct path.
We are using the 850 in a Windows CE 5.0 handheld device. Some years back we managed to find an API library somewhere (SWICEU.DLL - Dunno how we found it coz I can’t even google a single reference to it anywhere). We managed to use it to at least switch the radio on and off to avoid unnecessary battery drain. The card “auto-connects” when we switch it on and we didn’t have to do anything else.
Now we are looking at doing a few other things with the device but I am battling to get the API to do what I want. Obviously, being an unmanaged dll I need to do some awkward P/Invokes in .Net to get it working with managed code. This could be where I’m coming unstuck but it seems to me that it is possibly the dll that it not working.
Lets start with simply being able to configure the default profile (APN name and auto-connect). We currently setup the card using 3G Watcher but it is a pain to install and setup to do something so trivial which our application could be doing during startup. So currently I can open th driver, read the software version, IMEI, IMSI, etc but it just will not read (or set) the profile. The profile structure is obviously a bit more complicated than an IMEI structure but not as far as data marshling goes so I am pretty sure I’ve got it right. Yet the SwiGetProfile() method always returns FAILED.
Does anyone have experience using this driver for WinCE? Does it work for setting a default profile?
Once I’ve managed to do that, I’d like to try sending/receiving an SMS and would really love to find out the best way to respond to callbacks so I can show status, signals, etc. This almost works but proves to be unreliable (sometimes crashes) so I’m sure its an issue with the marshalling between .Net and the unmanaged code.
Other options are trying to roll my own “driver” using AT commands but at the moment I can’t even see the device as a virtual com port so this is a dead end. (At least I don’t think I can see it - Should it respond with “OK” if I send “AT”?)
You guys are my best shot at how to handle this. If there are problems with the driver, we’ll just have to live with what we’ve got but I’m getting nowhere fighting on my own.
Many thanks,
Lester