Remarks on the Belkin F8T020 Bluetooth CF card

In order to be able to make further multiplayer game (for my Multiplayer PPC Game Roundup) and WM5 compatibility (it'd be great to have the Widcomm BT stack on the Dell Axim x51 series PDA's, which are "damned" by the Microsoft Bluetooth stack) tests, I've purchased a cheap Belkin F8T020 Bluetooth CF card yesterday and spent some hours testing / trying to make it work in my various Pocket PC's and Jornada 720 H/PC. As, finally, I've managed to make it work after a lot (and I do mean this!) searching & tweaking and the card offers exceptional value for the price, I've decided to write a complete tutorial on making it work.

First, it's worth purchasing, particularly if you can get it for cheap. Half a year ago, it was solud out for $20 (see this AximSite thread); this may mean you can get one for dirt cheap.

Second, only do purchase it if you have an ARM-only Pocket PC 2000 (for example, the iPAQ 31xx/36xx without the PPC2k2 upgrade), a PPC2k2, a WM2003 or a WM2003SE device without built-in Bluetooth. It will not work on non-ARM Pocket PC 2000 devices (I've spent a lot of time on trying to make it work on my MIPS Casio E-125 to be absolutely sure. The driver could be installed but the card was never been recognized by the installed Widcomm GUI. Note that I've also tried to make it work with the Ambicom PPC2k driver (the latter is also Widcomm-based - see this thread) - without luck). The same stands for WM5 devices: it won't work with them either. (It's not possible to install the CAB file – every file ends up straight in \Windows\FilesToBeDeleted and get immediately deleted, while the system reports a successful installation.)

Forget the installation utility that comes with the card (and the one that is downloadable from Belkin's homepage). They are really outdated and pretty useless (will elaborate on this a bit later, in the "Advanced" section.)

The first (and, for pre-WM2003 users, only) file you'll need will be this. Just download it and unpack. If you have a PPC2k ARM / PPC2k2 device, you can run Setup.exe right away (after having inserted the card into your device); otherwise (with WM2003/ WM2003SE), you'll also need to import this registry import file into the Registry before starting the installation. (The registry file is in REGEDIT4 format; please read The Ultimate Roundup of Registry Editors for the Pocket PC for more information on compatible registry editors and on importing it.)

Please note that if you prefer CAB installs, download the CAB-only, 900kbyte-only version here. After decompressing it, just transfer the CAB file to your PDA and, after you've inserted the BT card in the PDA, click the file (with WM2003/ WM2003SE devices, after importing the registry import file). In addition, you'll need to import this registry import file too to avoid the license key expiration error.

Note that this is only the ARM CAB file. As has already been pointed out, the card can't be used in MIPS/SH3 Pocket PC's.

Then, after a simple reset, everything will be OK: the card will be recognized and the Widcomm BT stack also accessible, with all its goodies (for example, the wonderful and highly useful BT PAN). An example screenshot taken on my iPAQ 3660, showing the dicovered services in my other, BT-enabled Pocket PC's can be seen here – pretty cool, isn't it?

Advanced stuff

Only read this if you're interested in what other drivers I've tested! In everyday use, the above will just suffice and you won't need to install anything else.

The two official drivers

There're two official Belkin drivers for the card: the online one, with filedates 05/30/2002 and version 1.1b, which comes on the CD with the card, with filedates 01/21/2003. That is, the online version is definitely older than the latest available version. Not that I could see any difference between the two versions – both are very old (2002) and rather incapable. For example, they don't offer the BT Personal Area Networking at all.

An important note: the installer of the stack is not entirely CAB-based. Much as the majority of the files is installed via a single CAB file (c:\Program Files\Belkin\Bluetooth Manager (or Bluetooth Manager V1.1b, depending on the two versions)\Bluetooth Manager.PPC300_2577.cab), the installer is custom-installing files into \Windows and making registry changes on the PPC. That is, you must resort to a desktop-based install. (Not the best approach for people that try to avoid using/don't have access to the desktop...) Note that the installer considers the PCMCIA sleeve as "BT hardware"; therefore, remove the sleeve before starting the installation.

Much as these two versions worked flawlessly connecting my iPAQ 3660 to my HTC Wizard to use the latter as an EDGE modem (I've tested, worked flawlessly and made setting up he connection very easy by adding two new BT menu items to the "Select a modem" drop-down list in the Connectivity framework), it, contrary to what the documentation says, is not able to make use of LAN access capabilities (not in the least) - that is, BT PAN.

The F8T006 drivers

The F8T006 is just a PCMCIA-CF converter (note that the card will work with any converter in any device – I've used it with a noname, $10 converter) and the second edition of the F8T020 Bluetooth CF card bundled together. It is shipped with a substantially better and newer, Widcomm (1.4.1) BT stack than the original Belkin one.

The latter driver just doesn't work with the first edition of the card; that is, the F8T020. If you install it on a PPC2k2 device without installing the old Belkin drivers first, it won't notice the inserted BT card.

If you install it on top of an existing Belkin driver installation (regardless of their being 1.0 or 1.1b), the Belkin driver will no longer be able to load the card drivers (it'll complain of driver memory shortage).

If you install the F8T006 drivers first and, then, the "old" official drivers (even with telling the latter to update the former when it shows a dialog box about this), then, the latter won't be seen either.

That is, the F8T006 drivers seem to be completely useless. A user has reported the same (and another the opposite) here. Also, over at AximSite, there were a few users reporting the same.

Other devices

I've also tried to make use of the card in my MIPS PPC2000 Casio E-125 with a MIPS H/PC driver downloaded from here (in addition to the MIPS driver in the Widcomm 1.3.1 stack). A no-go.

Well-known cmonex has stated it works with H/PC 2000 devices like the Jornada 720 too with the standard PPC / HPC hacks.

UPDATE (10/04/2006): Made some additional searches for the COM drivers; unfortunately, the official homepage has been down for over a year. On the French COM1 file archive I couldn't find it either. That is, use the unofficial links provided at the beginning of the article.