EndlessDissent

I live in Schaumburg and work in Addison. I was watching for LTE last night on my way to work via the Elgin-O'hare/I355, but got nothing. I know it was still the night before the pre-launch, but I was hoping to see something. I'm still on 3G this morning at home. I really hope they get Schaumburg lit up soon. It would be nice to be able to consistently stream Google Music on my way to work. On 3G, it's a 50/50 chance that the connection will be fast enough to keep up with the songs.

The MIUI ROM has come with dual indicators by default for both phones I've had experience with (OG EVO and GS3). It may be because the devs porting MIUI are using Sense as the base ROM on the EVO LTE instead of an AOSP-based ROM. On both my Evo 4G and GS3, it's ported using CM as a base, but I've heard that a lot of devs are moving to OEM bases like Sense and Touchwiz because they're more "feature-complete". That may affect the ROM's ability to display both indicators. It would probably end up showing the 1x signal like the stock OEM ROM. You could ask in the XDA threads for a real answer.

Like you said, that method bypasses the dialer to launch apps. Unfortunately, the necessary apps for the dialer functions are not included in AOSP ROMs like Cyanogenmod or AOKP, so no, neither of those apps will make dialer codes work. All of the debug-type functionality you would need is part of the OEM ROMs, so you lose that stuff if you flash a non-Samsung/HTC/LG/whatever-based ROM. Not sure if you're interested, but the MIUI ROM shows both a 1x and 3G signal indicator. Though, some people think it's a bug, and the person porting the ROM may "fix" it so it shows only one indicator. I know there is a port of MIUI for the Evo LTE, so you may want to check it out.