Mixed in with all our other troubles with Rover’s engine, our Pepwave Max Transit Duo went offline.  Nothing seemed to help.  It refused to acknowledge the AT&T SIM.  It has four SIM ports and none of them would show the SIM “present”.  I went to AT&T and got a new SIM.  No change.  I went through various reboots and full power cycles – no change.  The router still functioned – it could pass Starlink and even pass the personal hotspot from my phone. 

I tried a factory reset.  That’s supposed to reset everything, right?  Well, it turns out it doesn’t.  With some devices, when you factory reset, it reloads the original factory firmware stored in some ROM.  I can understand why you might not want to do that – old broken code, etc.  

The Pep stores TWO versions of firmware.  Mine had 8.2.0 and 8.2.1 and was running the latter.  

The Pep stopped working when Rover was sitting in Ford’s parking lot – with too much electrical load running in the RV and skies were cloudy and of course, it’s fall so we get less sun into the panels.  The lithium’s dropped charge and voltage until the inverter shut off and somewhere along there, the Pep shut down too.  It is powered directly off the battery feed so it continued to run until the battery voltage got below whatever the modem’s limit was.  As crazy as things were, I didn’t track exactly when it all quit.

Service – NOT

Pepwave was contacted – no help.  They declared the router: Broken.  They also reminded me that I didn’t re-up on the $200/year warranty so – tough luck!  They have no repair service.  Even if you have a warranty claim, then just swap routers.  Of course, someone takes these broken routers and tries to fix them and put them back onto the warranty swap train – but nope, if you didn’t pay their annual warranty tribute, you are supposed to just go buy another one.  I went back to the vendor I bought it from, and they offered me a %15 off on a new router.

No way!  Unacceptable!  I even looked on Ebay and found the Pepwave modems there are running about half of list price.  Part of the reason I went with the Max Transit Duo was the ability to handle two active sims and two cell modems.  We actually used that feature for a while.  But with Starlink now as our second connection – I would buy something simpler, smaller and cheaper instead of the Duo.  

So, in desperation

I took the Duo down from the shelf and removed the cover.  I couldn’t find anything loose, smoked, melted etc.  I put it back together, booted it up and thought of one last thing to try.

Voila!

As I mentioned above, the Duo stores two versions of firmware.  I told it to go BACK to 8.2.0.  I rebooted running 8.2.0 – and came up with no config.  Apparently going back a version clears everything.  Then I told it to go back to 8.2.1 – reboot.  Then, since all the config was again gone, I searched my computer for an old config file – found one from June 2022 (prior to the big problem), uploaded it – and Voila!  Apparently, when the power went sketchy, something in the PEP got corrupted. Something not fixed by rebooting or even a factory reset.

It was working.  AT&T was recognized.  It was passing traffic.  It’s still working, months later, passing AT&T and Starlink traffic.