Wifi greyed out after falling down
Ipad Air 2 Cellular
Hi all,
who can help me with my wife’s Ipad Air 2 Cellular 128GB? It fell down – at first we thought to be lucky. It crashed on the back leaving a heavy dent mark and a bended frame but the display was OK. But then we saw that the wifi / cellular function became inaccessible. The wifi icon is greyed out and the cellular option are no longer shown in the menu at all.
After reading several tips like resetting the network settings, turning on / off in flight mode or completely restoring in DFU mode I decided that it is definitely an HW issue. It seems that the mainboard is still OK. The Ipad still shows the MAC address and BT is working fine. So the communication to the radio interface seems to be working. So my assumption is that one of the antennas is broken. So I ended up with opening the ipad – worked fine. First I bent back the frame and disconnected all antennas – 3 cables, two going to top, one to the down side which seems to be connected to the housing. Unfortunately, I didn’t help – wifi is still greyed out. So my assumption is that either radio is checking the antennas for the right impedance / resistance or the dent mark in the housing is grounding some parts on the back of the mainboard.
This leads to four questions:
First, is there any chance to check the antennas for defects, maybe by measuring the resistance?
Second, is it wise to order a “new” set of antennas on eBay. They don’t costs too much but is there any chance that they will solve the issue?
Third, should I remove the board and hammer out the dent mark? Is there anything on the back of the board which could be grounded by the housing causing the issue?
Fourth, should I scrap the device and sell it as spare parts?
Scrapping it would be a shame though as it seems to work fine except for wifi / cellular functions.
Many Thanks, Daniel
PS: the dent mark is underneath the mainboard, near the right rim, rather in the middle where shilded part and the black foiled part are touching (on the same height where two battery cells are touching).
Is this a good question?