Nortel Networks Richardson, TX – Contractor Programmer October 2000 to February 2001
Worked in a cell phone tools development group.

• The first step was to prove that useful CDMA cell communication parameters could be obtained by serially communicating with a CDMA cell phone from a PC. For this first step I modified Microsoft’s VCTERM to communicate with the phone to dial phone numbers, hang up the phone, and to collect reception data from the phone.
• The next step was to prove that an existing drive test tool that executes on a PC that was set up to work with GSM phones could be modified to work with CDMA phones. What was provided was an incomplete set of source code (with .obj files to satisfy the linker), some files with places to be filled in, and sketchy documents explaining what needed to be done to add CDMA capability to the drive test tool. As an interim, the following was done:
  • Temporary dialog boxes were set up.
  • CDMA phones require polling in order to obtain data, unlike GSM phones that issue messages upon an initial request. A separate thread was added to perform the polling.
• Later on more source files came that showed how the communications was done with the GSM cell phones. Code for CDMA was added to the software package consistent with the original methods used.
• Microsoft Visual C++ (with C++ and MFC) was used.