SIM7000A Development Board NB-IoT eMTC 4G GPS Module LTE-CAT-M1 Quad-Band FDD-LTE B2 B4 B12 B13 US Network for Windows Linux Geekstory

This board is great for developing with LTE-M1! LTE-M1 is the future of cellular IoT, as 2G and even 3G networks are currently being phased out.I recommend using the TinyGSM library, which has beta support for this modem.Some gotchas:- The board requires more than 5V to be powered, but will NOT work with anything other than 3.3V logic levels (the level shifter gets really noisy with 5V logic). Try connecting with 3.3V logic levels on 115200 baud.- You need to supply your own GPS antenna and 4G antenna. These can be found relatively cheaply; I took mine off of an A9G modem I bought on Amazon earlier.- You need to supply your own SIM card--I used a Things Mobile M2M SIM card, which seems to work just fine, and is also available on amazon.

I spent several hours getting this module to work over the USB port. It would power up ok, let me do a network search via AT commands but would timeout and fail whenever I would try to connect to a specific carrier.Turns out this board needs more power than the standard 500mA that USB 2.0 provides. To get around this I wired the V and G pins to a 5V/2A wall charger and connected it directly to a Raspberry Pi via the R and T pins and it seems to work fine. A little disappointing as this technology is supposed to be low power but not too bad if you just want to experiment with the technology. I bet you could get away with much less than 2A of power, or perhaps a powered USB hub but I haven't tested either of these scenarios.Supposedly this module is certified by Verizon but it seems like you need a special Verizon issued SIM card to actually connect to their network. With my Hologram SIM inserted I'm able to see Verizon but whenever I try to select their network I get a registration denied error. Per Hologram support you need to be a volume customer and go through a validation process to access their network. And since I can't see T-Mobile at all I'm stuck with AT&T. Still not complaining though... it does what I need it to do.

I have tested the device using my microcontroller and pc, it sometimes works, and then sometimes stops working altogether. Very inconsistent! I have had so much set back because the device simply won't respond to AT commands. I debugged my microcontroller, was good, then found out with the SAME configuration it worked temporarily, then stopped again. I checked all the wires, were secured, so breakout board HAS to be faulty. Why would you stamp 'QA Pass' if it didn't pass QA??? or is your QA just not good? This is very frustrating.

Worked great for a night of testing. Was able to communicate with it over my laptop using USB and the serial port using an ESP32. Unfortunately, the antenna connector broke off when I tried to remove my test antenna.

Product is great. Works with Canada Networks, the only problem is that there is zero documentation to set it up. I figure it out since I have a lot of experience with arduino and hobbytronics. I started a refund process but I canceled after I got it going.