Hi All,
I’ve been using the Lilygo T-Beam for over two years now, as a LoRA tracker, and I’ve always been a little unsatisfied with the design of the thing, especially as a tracker that one can slip into a pocket. The size of PCB is clearly designed around a 18650 Li-ion cell. Anyway, as someone who has a reputation for giving hardware a jolly good thrashing when out in the hills (i.e. I’m not that careful), I’ve snapped the antenna on numerous occasions, and I’ve lost count of the number times I’ve had to replace the SMA connector.
I was therefore pleased when Heltec recently brought out the LoRA tracker, same ESP32, SX1262 LoRa chipset and a UC6580 GNSS:
It’s sold on Aliexpress as either the EU868 for Meshtastic or EU433 for very little money, and is now supported by Richard Guzman’s excellent Git Repos:
To protect the board I recently found this case being sold on eBay, for £17 including a BL-5C 1020mAH Li-ion battery - which slots neatly into the back of the case.
Here are some pictures of the one I recently carried up Cadair Berwyn on the GW/NW SOTA weekend:
The only “soldering” one needs to do, is to attach the other end of JST 1.0mm connector to a small plastic battery thingy that the battery plugs into.
It’s a very neat design and I cannot recommend the combination of the two enough. It is the LoRA tracker I’ve been looking for for a while:
https://aprs.fi/#!z=9&call=a%2FM0JKS-7&timerange=86400&tail=86400
To configure Richard’s git repos to build for this particular board, after cloning the repos, change platformio.ini so the default_envs variable is set to “heltec_wireless_tracker”
[platformio]
default_envs = heltec_wireless_tracker
and then when uploading the configuration (Alien thingy on the left-hand side), select “heltec_wireless_tracker” and then “Upload Filesystem Image”:
Obviously, as with all the other trackers, one needs to edit the file data/tracker_config.json. All I did was change the Callsign to “M0JKS-7” and edit the “lora” section, removing all the other LoRA frequencies except 439.9125MHz (which Richard has kindly added for U.K hams):
Regards
Dave