Disabling EVDO on a Motorola Razr V3m from Verizon
January 19th, 2008If you don’t know what EVDO or CDMA are, my basic understanding is that they are wireless protocols used to transfer data between cell towers and cell phones. EVDO is the higher-speed, but higher power-consuming option. There are two reasons someone would want to disable EVDO: to save a little battery life, and as one of the steps to getting effectively free Internet on a laptop through their phone.
You know to which infrastructure your phone is connected by a symbol at the top of the screen. "EV" means EVDO, while "1X" means CDMA. (I think the 1 also implies the version of CDMA, but that’s over my head.) By default the phone connects to EVDO if it is available, otherwise it will connect to CDMA. The goal of this tutorial is to make the phone prefer CDMA over EVDO. Doing so shouldn’t have any effect on the performance of calls, though downloads through Get it Now would probably be slower.
So let’s get to it!
First, you need to put your phone in debug mode. This is done by typing "##DEBUG" ("##33284") into the phone as if you were making a call. You have to be quick about it. You know that it worked if the final digit, 4, isn’t displayed. Upon typing "##DEBUG", the phone should look like this: 
Now you can get in to the FTS menu. I don’t know what "FTS" stands for, but it allows you to change some settings in the phone that aren’t usually accessible.
To get into the FTS menu, now that you are in debug mode, press "CLR" and then the left soft button. Pressing that combination at any time will get you in and out of the FTS menu. Note that you do not hold "CRL" while pressing the left soft button.
Now press the right soft button ("NEXT") until you arrive at the screen that lists "HDR Pref" on it. 
Now press the down button until "HDR Pref" is selected. Notice that "PREV" and "NEXT" have changed to "EXIT" and "CHANGE". 
Press the right soft button ("CHANGE") until "HDR Pref" is set to "cdma". 
Press the left soft button ("EXIT"). The phone will be unresponsive for about 15 seconds. Eventually the screen will show the FTS screen briefly, display another screen, and then then settle on a final screen. I can only assume this is the phone restarting. 
Now you just have to get out of the FTS menu and disable debug mode.
To get out of the FTS menu, press "CLR" and then the left soft button. Now that you’re back at the home screen, notice that the "EV" symbol at the top of the screen changed to "1X".
The way you get out of debug mode is the same way you got in. Just type ##DEBUG from the home screen. Make sure that debug mode is disabled by pressing "CLR" and then the left soft button. If you don’t see the FTS screen, you’ve done it right.
You’re done.
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Okay, I was putzing in debug mode and started scrolling through the audio settings. Unfortunately, auto, where it started, isn’t one of the settings. Help! Is there a way to change it back. Now everything comes out the speaker.
The speaker phone is probably on. Try turning it off by holding the button above the volume rocker for a second.
Internet on the road for "free" with a Razr — My Piece of the Inter(.)net posted on January 24, 2008:
[...] Next, you must disable EVDO and enable CDMA. This doesn’t work if the phone is connected to the cell towers with EVDO. You can do this by following my tutorial on how to disable EVDO. [...]
Does CDMA cost any money when running it on your phone.
Is it better or worse than EVDO
McWalters12, using EVDO or CDMA for cell-phone activities does not affect your bill. I haven’t noticed any difference between the two, though EVDO is supposedly faster than CDMA, but I don’t notice the difference in my regular cell phone tasks (calls, and a little text messaging). Downloading things from Get It Now is probably slower with CDMA. If the browsing speeds of laptops connected to the internet though EVDO and CDMA connections, I have no doubt that the EVDO modem would smoke CDMA by a large margin. The problem is that connecting via EVDO requires another monthly contract.
Whenever I start up my phone now, It goes into FTS Mode. Is there a way to make it so it doesnt go into FTS mode at start up?
You can get in and out of the FTS menu by pressing press “CLR” and then the left soft button.
To get out of debug mode, type “##DEBUG” (“##33284″) into the phone as if you were making a call. You have to be quick about it. You know that it worked if the final digit, 4, isn’t displayed. Try pressing CLR and then the left soft button. If you don’t get the FTS menu you know you got out of debug mode. If you do get the FTS menu then try typing ##DEBUG again.
Thanks so much for this post. For whatever reason, I couldn’t make any voice calls when my phone was in EVDO. After following your steps, I’ve stuck to CDMA and haven’t had any problems with calls. Thanks!!
Great!
when i put ##33284 the 4 doesnt come out like it was supposed to but then nothing happens when i press clr and the left soft key it just deletes and then goes back
thanks guys this site is great….i’m a complete loser when it comes to phones, but this helped me out a lot..thanks…ricky
I’m glad I could help, Ricky.
This code ##33284 does not seem to be working for razr V8 luxury edition. Does anybody know the code for this phone to get into debug mode?