Someone asked; What is the (Noahlink Wireless / Noahlink Wireless 2) Driver issue?

[pvc]

A long time ago, GN ReSound developed a wireless hearing programming device named Airlink which connected to your computer via USB. Did that GN ReSound Airlink device have a signed Windows driver? Yes, I believe it did. Why does it matter that a signed Windows driver is available? It means you just plug a USB Plug-N-Play device into a USB port on your computer and it is ready to work.

Some time later, GN ReSound developed another wireless hearing programming device named Airlink 2. This device also connected to your computer via USB and it was also USB Plug-N-Play with a signed Windows driver. Noteworthy, is that each of the manufacturer's (The Big 6, now the Big 5) had multiple versions of their own proprietary wireless hearing aid programming devices.

Circa 2016; HIMSA announced the arrival of the Industry-Standard Noahlink Wireless hearing aid programming device!! Here's a → Link, and here's a quote from that link; “The age of BLE-enabled hearing instruments is on our doorstep,” stated the Managing Director at HIMSA. “This is why the industry’s largest manufacturers have gotten together to design a common industry standard device for programming these new instruments.”

Oh, but guess what? The device was renamed from (Airlink 2 to Noahlink Wireless). Was it a new device? No it was not, is was the same device as GN ReSound's Airlink 2 device. HIMSA had (and still has) a readily available firmware update that will cause a proprietary Airlink 2 device to become an industry standard Noahlink Wireless device.

But wait, you can't just rename a device that has a signed Windows driver, can you? No apparently not. Not without more workarounds. Each hearing aid manufacturer's later versions of hearing aid fitting software has a new HIMSA (unsigned I believe) Noahlink Wireless driver, which they deposit into your computer, under HIMSA in your Windows Control Panel/Device Manager.

Was it a signed Windows driver? Nope, I don't think so. But if you installed the fitting software first, that HIMSA driver would be used automatically? Ah, but what about if you get anxious and plug in your Noahlink Wireless first; before installing the fitting software. Then, you would be missing that HIMSA Noahlink Driver. But HIMSA has a workaround for that too. You could download the HIMSA Noahlink Wireless driver direct from HIMSA and that should get you going.

Now that Noahlink Wireless 2 is here (and because Noahlink Wireless 2 has a signed Windows driver) things should be okay, right? Well no, things are not okay!! Which driver gets assigned for your new Noahlink Wireless 2 device is not yet standardized. See this → post. It's a crap-shoot as to which driver you will be using for your new Noahlink Wireless 2.

• the old HIMSA Noahlink Wireless Driver
• the new/Signed/Windows driver under Universal Serial Bus Devices as "Noahlink Wireless 2"

 

[pvc]

AND I believe, that because it is left up to chance which driver you will use for your new Noahlink Wireless 2 hardware, then we must be getting automatically down-levelled to the functionality of a Noahlink Wireless device. I don't see how we can use the newer functionality of the Noahlink Wireless 2 device, for example (BLE 5.3 protocol instead of BLE 4.2) when we may still be using the old Noahlink Wireless driver?

 

[pvc]

AND, this is still not fully resolved! Even, after approximately a decade of time?

I did find a workaround in the other → post that will force my Noahlink Wireless 2 to use the new signed Noahlink Wireless 2 driver instead of the old Noahlink Wireless driver under HIMSA.

But I don't see how that resolves the main issue?? Which is, how can we begin to use the new capabilities of Noahlink Wireless 2 if the driver that was selected, is still the old Noahlink Wireless driver?