Recently I’ve been playing with creating UPPs – Unprotected Profile Packages – The “profile” that gets loaded onto eSIMs.

While that’s worthy of a post itself, for testing I’ve found it really convenient to be able to “explore” the created SIM profile in PySIM, Gemalto Card Admin, etc, and check the behavior in a real handset using the SIMtrace.

So how do you get an eSIM onto a physical card?

For that I’m using a physical consumer eSIM, which is a physical SIM card I can load an eSIM onto.

Normally the eSIM is baked into your phone, but this one isn’t, it’s baked into a 4FF form factor.

But while iOS and Android have got flows for loading the eSIM (the Local Profile Assistant), this is just a bit of plastic, so we need our own external LPA to pull the eSIM from the SM-DP+ and load it onto the card.

So in addition to this a SIM card reader I used a nifty util called MiniLPA which is the Local-Profile-Assistant, used to load eSIM profiles onto the eSIM itself.

I installed the Debian package of MiniLPA, started it up, plugged in my SIM reader and consume eUICC, then took the LPA address and split the SM-DP+ address (the Domain name part) and the ID (the long hex string part) up and plugged them into the download profile window and boom, I had a profile loaded and could work with the eSIM profile on a physical card.