With the G5300i firmware, it appears that LG removed the ability to turn off the operator logo. The result is you must live with the name of your network provider covering up your wallpaper.

This is annoying, and perhpas embarrasing if your network provider is Virgin :) But there might be a work-around for some people.

Please note that much of what follows has been deduced, and is likely to be incorrect. Corrections are welcomed.

Our aim here is to change or remove the message that is displayed when the phone is connected to the phone network. This is not always possible - or at least I've not worked out how to do it for all networks. Perhaps an explanation will show why:

Step one: Work out your country code

Internally, the G5300i has a list of countries and country codes. In the case of the LG5300i, part of the list looks something like this:

Table 1

Code	Country
05 05	AUS
02 03	CAN
24 04	UAE

In this example the phone's internal code would be 05 05 for Australia, 02 03 for Canada and 24 04 for the United Arab Emirates. I don't know if this list is standardised at all - I imagine that the phone tower transmits 'AUS' or 'CAN' etc. and the phone uses this information to do it's cross-reference.

Update: This code is often referred to as the 'MCC' or 'Mobile Country Code'. A list of MCC's and MNC's can be found here.

Step two: What network am I to use?

Well, I'm going to take a stab at this one- but again it is pure conjecture. If anyone has better information, please let me know and I'll update the page.

If we focus on Australia, since that is my home country, we'd notice that the phone has another list of networks that looks something like this:

Table 2

Country code	Network code	Net name	Display 1	Display 2
05 05	01	Telstra	Telstra	Telstra
05 05	02	Optus	%p %c	YES OPTUS
05 05	03	VFONE	Vodafone %c	VODAFONE
05 05	08	OneTel	One Tel	One Tel Network

Now this table is the interesting one. The country code that was determined in the previous step is used to look-up the networks that the phone knows about in the given country. I'm not sure if the 'net name' is located on the SIM (probably), or if the relevant phone tower transmits it (during authentication), or some other combination. In any case, there are a few of points to take home from the table.

1. Through experimentation, it is the value in the 'Display 1' column that is displayed over the phone's wallpaper. The value in 'Display 2' is used elsewhere.. (In the network settings menu, for one)

2. The phone can cope - sometimes expects - the phone tower to transmit additional information. The ''%p" and "%c" in the 'Display 1' column are fields that will be substituted with information from the tower. This is at the network providers discretion of course.

3. Not all available networks are listed here. In Australia, we're missing Virgin mobile, Orange, AAPT and probably others that I can't think of right now.

Point three is the sticking point. I can confirm that for both Optus and Vodafone, I was able to stop the network name from appearing over the wallpaper. However, I was unable to hide Virgin Mobile's, and I'm not in a position to test for any other network. Virgin, for example, use the Optus network. Therefore the phone can only obtain the network name from the SIM or from the phone network itself.

So - assuming we are on a network that's in the phone's list, there's a chance we can change the value of 'Display 1' to suit our goal.

We will need a few things first.

A method of extracting a copy of the firmware from the phone, or a place to download it.
A suitable editor to modify the firmware slightly.
A method of uploading the modified firmware back onto the phone.

I'm going to give another warning - following these steps is not a good idea. Anyone that does follow them is doing so at their own risk and must accept the consequenses of their own actions.

1. Obtain the firmware
Since I wanted to change my G5300 to a G5300i, I had to get copies of G5300i firmware. There are a few places on the net that have it available for download. Please refer to this page for further details.
If I already had a G5300i, I would probably have preferred to extract the current firmware. Again, refer to this page for further details.

2. Modify the firmware
The firmware I downloaded was a binary file (represented by the extension .bif or .bin). Had it been extracted directly from the phone, it would also be a binary file. Editing binary files requires an editor specifically designed for the task. An excellent freeware hex editor for windows is frhed. It's small, efficient and free. A link to the current home page follows:

The firmware for the G5300i is contained in two files- conveniently they normally have the suffix '1' and '2'. I loaded the file '1' into frhed. After loading, it looked something like this:

If you've never used a hex editor, then some simple explanations are in order. We have a number of columns here- the first column is the offset from the start of the file. We then have the file contents represented first in bytes (in hexadecimal) and finally the last column represents the same data only it is shown in printable ASCII.

Now I will search for my country- in this case Australia. (Remember table 1 above?) In the firmware that I'm using, this table starts at about offset 0x327740. I will jump there directly by selecting "Edit -> Go To" from the menu, and typing the offset.

Looking through the right column, I can find 'AUS' which I'm going to make a semi-educated guess means Australia.. :)

In the Green is the Country, in the red is the code, 05 05. Now I need to find the networks listing (ie: the second table I mentioned earlier).

One way to find the networks is to simply scroll down and look for them. This will take a while, as there's quite a few! Instead, my preference is to click once on the first 05 to set the current cursor position, then highlight just the 05 05 in the editor. Now click "Edit -> Find" in the menu.

We can see that frhed fills in the search criteria for us automatically. <bh:05> is how the byte 05 is represented in the search dialog box.

frhed will search from the current cursor position down, and so the very first match just happens to be the first network in the phone's list that is relevant for Australia.

You should be able to see how this relates to table 2 above - I made the table in the same order as it is represented in the firmware. In yellow, the first match to '05 05' is highlighted. Immediately following is what I call the network number. A few bytes later is the Net name, followed by Display1 and finally Display2.

If we have a look at the value of the byte following the readable text for Display1 and Display2, you'll notice it's 00. It's quite common to terminate text with 0's (or nulls).

So what happens if the very first byte of the Display1 line is null? I've highlighted the first byte of Display1 in green for three networks. I'm currently using the Vodafone network, and so I'm going to click on the byte '56' (just the green one) and change it to '00'. Now I save the firmware file with a new name.

After saving the firmware to disk, I flashed the slightly modified firmware to the phone and tested it. Details on how I flased the phone are here.

I've tested for both Optus, Vodafone and Virgin here in Australia. Both Optus and Vodafone worked, but Virgin's not in the list and so this approach doesn't work for them. Telstra and all other carriers are untested.

Update: If your network number isn't in one of the lists, then I had an idea that might work. You'll need access to a nokia phone and 'Oxygen Phone Manger II'. If you install your SIM card into the nokia phone, and connect the phone to your computer with either a data cable or infrared, then Oxygen can display your country code and the network code that the phone is currently using. eg:


There is probably other ways of doing this, but this is all I know about at the moment. Using the MCC and MNC, you might be able to edit the firmware and create an entry for your network. The Country Code should be there already, so just try editing one of the network numbers to match the network number of your phone. This is untested - if anyone tries this, let me know if it works! Thanks.

I don't use the G5300 anymore- I did the firmware flash purely to prove that it can be done. If anyone works out a better way to do this, let me know and I'll update the page for historical purposes.