There has been a lot of talk more recently that the HTC Desire S actually suffers from the major problem that the iPhone 4 had which was the Death Grip where your signal would completely drop out when you held your phone normally. I can confirm that this is partially correct – there is a lot of speculation as to what the actual problem is. I seem to see it more when you are connected to a wi-fi point where the signal will drop around 20 dbm when you move your hand across the phone. There are reports that this is also the same for the likes of your 3G & H band signals but it seems that the user case is different each time.

 

The major problem is that no one problem is the same. Some people are experiencing problems with wi-fi signals some with their GSM radio signal – the best thing to do is to monitor your findings over a long period of time, a couple of weeks to be exact so that you can see a patern and then decide on the best course of action. You will also probably be looking to install a wi-fi signal monitor that will accurately tell you the signal strength so that you can measure it at different times and with the phone in different positions. Once you find a pattern (if there is one) next you will need to do a little bit of research see if anyone running the same software as you with the same radio and model has the same problem. A lot of people seem to think it is a software problem which will lie in the radio updates, where as other think it is actually a design flaw in the phone. Especially since the main antenna is in your battery cover (little gold contacts – check them out).

 

To solve the issue is really up to yourself, there are some serious problems in identifying where the actual problem lies and you will need to do some serious research in to try and find out a solution for your problem. My gut instinct is telling me to solve the issue you will need to fully update all the software the phone is running, OS and radio. This at least  gets rid of one of the variables and leaves you with the hardware issue itself.

 

This fault has been reported on both stock and modified ROMS so be careful what you choose to flash and for the love of god make sure you flash the correct rom/radio for your specific phone. I will not be held accountable for silly mistakes you make like that – you have been warned!!

When you first buy your android phone (and most probably every other phone) it will run a “radio Interface Layer” usually between the Android OS and the Radio device itself. This way they can communicate between each other so that the main functions of the phone can actually work.

 

However in some cases, and if you live a little bit on the edge then you may want to update this image with a more new up to date one. People frequently do this to avoid signal drop outs that happen to them or just general mobile phone signal problems. Majority of time these fixes are released in the next OTA update however if you are running custom builds you obviously won’t be able to get the OTA updates.

 

Now just to mark this with a disclaimer. If you actually geographically have signal problems then this will not fix them. This fix should only be performed if there is an up to date radio for your device and also if you are experiencing signal drop outs where you know there shouldn’t be. I will not be held liable for anything you follow out of this guide, you can brick your phone by incorrectly flashing the wrong radio. Make sure you are aware of the consequences if you do something wrong and that you know what you are going before you go any further.

 

1. Download the updated radio zip image
2. Place the downloaded file onto your microSD card and rename it PG88IMG.zip
3. Reboot your phone into the HBOOT menu (fastboots needs to be disabled)
4. Once in HBOOT you will be prompted if you want to flash the new image to the phone – select yes
5. After the process if complete you should just need to reboot your device and that’s it

 

Once your phone has booted (if you carried out the steps correctly) you should have a new radio image working on your phone. Once it has booted and everything is working, you will need to remove the image file from your microSD card so that it doesn’t keep trying to flash the image on every boot.