This has reminded me that before traveling overseas to get here, when I opened the back and replaced the modem with the version matching the destination country’s bands, I had the distinct impression that it was not installed correctly.
The two connectors seemed okay but the modem felt slightly off, as if it would not click into place in the way that I might have expected. But it has been largely working fine for weeks. I might reply here with more when I have time available to open it up.
Knock on wood, at the moment I’m sending this message over a different Librem 5 with a different SIM that I happened to bring along, despite it having the wrong modem for this country, so I may end up rotating devices if I can’t get time to navigate the modem. Thinking of that… moving the modem that matches the local country into that other device might be a very informative test.
Assuming, that is, that my process for disconnecting and connecting the modems is sufficiently careful that nothing is ending up wrong afterwards. The other spare Librem 5 that I brought along is the one whose modem was destroyed here and later replaced, so I guess when I think about it, I have maybe a questionable track record of this. Seems that I have removed and reattached modems a total of 7 times across devices, as I recall, with one of them destroying the modem as in the above link and now this. So perhaps a 1.5 / 7 failure rate. This would seem to be higher than 20% chance of damaging it if I open it up, although thinking back to this story for why I opened the Librem 5 and damaged the modem that first time, back then I did not read the documentation and was not careful and perhaps deserved the outcome that I created. So maybe it’s actually a 0.5 / 6 failure rate which is closer to 8% and seems much lower.