Continuing the discussion from Building a LoRa APRS 439Mhz iGate (Part 3) - #100 by MM0FMF.
Previous discussions:
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A problem I have with my HelTec iGate is that it’s high up the back of the garden with a nice 70cms co-linear that can see the countryside nicely, but it has a diddy little helical WiFi antenna, and it’s less than great at staying connected to the WiFi, especially when the weather’s a bit damp. Has anyone found a way to add an external WiFi antenna to the board?
I found a hack for a Pi Zero 2W which had a similar problem, and it now gets the WiFi mostly just fine, and looks like this…
…but the Pi Zero 2W has pads on its board to allow a socket to be soldered on. The HelTec iGate board does not… 
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The Heltec Wireless Stick Lite boards have a second U.FL socket on board, for connection of an external 2.4GHz WiFi/Bluetooth antenna.
However, there’s no convenient way to disconnect the on-board slot antenna - you’d have to get in with a scaplel and cut the track?
Yeah, that was the way with the Pi Zero too…
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I have a similar problem, with my tower some 20m from the house. I thought about uncoiling the WiFi antenna and if necessary adding or trimming to 3cm for a quarter wave end fed. Probably can’t be any worse as an antenna and should really be a lot better than the silly little coil.
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G5OLD-7 is up and running, used it on the hills over the past few days and working great! Thanks for everyone’s help.
Made contact with many gates, with a 135mile contact on Fan Brechienhog GW/SW-003 to @M0JKS Dave’s Digipeater on dark peak.
Well impressed with this for 70cm- Is this as good as it gets ?
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It works over 400km on line-of-sight paths:
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My iGate has been seeing a lot more traffic than usual over the last few days. I suspect there’s been some slightly unusual UHF propagation, perhaps down to the weather?
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Perhaps - 2m VHF has been really good in the last few days. Really good propagation
One of my digipeaters relayed a packet at 220 km. Stable ducting.
What’s interesting is that my 135mile contact with M0JKS-1 was as I was coming up through the cloud layers, not while I was on the summit.
I not experienced enough to know if this is conditions for ducting but certainly some of the best conditions I’ve had in the brecons….
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Fantastic views!
We, I guess, have been sitting underneath all that cloud for the last several days…
There was lots of tropo on 6cms/3cms a day or so ago in the S. of England to France.
I’m giving my tracker and igate a first SOTA test tomorrow (30/12) on G/DC-008 late morning.
The igate will think it is still at home as I haven’t changed the coordinates but I don’t think this should stop it working.
I recall reading about a mobile igate earlier in this thread but I haven’t seen anything more about it.
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Things went well with my first SOTA trial of the iGate and tracker on G/DC-008 today. The iGate was in my campervan, connected to a cheap 70cm mag mount on the roof and registered on the 'vans Wi-Fi which is generated by a Teltonika broadband router.
The tracker was in a side pocket of my rucksack.
I was tracked most of the way to the summit, only losing the signal near the summit, which has a flat top. In the screenshot below the walk is from the road on the left towards the right.
I forgot to turn the tracker off on the return so it tracked me back home except for a gap in the middle. Given the rucksack was on the floor of the 'van I’m impressed the GPS worked at all!
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I just visited the LoRa APRS Wikki and noticed this inactivity marker.
Hopefully my visit has just reset the inactivity marker.
But it looks like it’s a use it or lose it situation.
Just looking at the stations my LoRa picked up and shows two DigiPeaters that made contact with my iGate.
M0MZB-15 and MB7ULU-2. Would these be DigiPeaters just be repeating a LoRa signal?
Cheers
John
M0VAZ
It would be their periodic position beacons which you heard John.
By the way, I saw that yours was one of the many iGates which picked up packets from Polish pico-balloon SP2ROC-11 yesterday morning, as it was flying 11km above the Irish Sea:
This one was cycling its LoRa beacons between 439.9125 and 433.775
It was launched just before Christmas and has been right around the globe since then!
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Thanks, that explains that then. I did’nt see SP2ROC-11 in my LoRa list from above - how are you seeing that my LoRa picked up SP2 ?
This Grafana page from the Amateur SondeHub shows all the receivers which picked it up yesterday (there are a lot, so you’ll need to scroll down!)
The usual APRS web-pages just attribute each packet to a single receiver - whichever was fastest to upload to the Server.
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