John G3WGV and I installed a LoRa igate on John’s tower. First indications are very positive. It should provide excellent coverage in the North Pennines (Cross Fell area). It may possibly work on some eastern Lakes tops although that’s not an optimal direction from John’s QTH.
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Thanks. It looks (far as I can tell) exactly like the one in this post → LoRa APRS Tracker (Part 3) - #13 by M0JKS
The box it came in describes it as:
HTIT-Tracker
433~510
LoRa WiFi BLE GNSS
Though I had (I thought) selected the correct board, the first time I ran the build and upload it tried to use what I guess is the default board, and gave me some red FAILED messages. I re-visited platformio.ini and hunted down “heltec_wifi_lora_32_v3_GPS” which looked like the best match at the time. I put that in as the default, and that, after a fresh build, allowed me to upload code. However, the filesystem upload failed. Finally, I found mention of “heltec_wireless_tracker” and set that as default, cleaned and re-built the code, and got green SUCCESS messages for both code and filesystem uploads. However, somewhere along the way the device’s screen stopped displaying anything, and there seems to be nothing I can do to get it to come back to life.
What I think I need now is a way to reset the board to factory conditions, or reload the bootloader, or otherwise get back to step one.
Or maybe a new board…
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It must have heard me. Without my doing anything apart from going out for a couple of hours plus and leaving it un-powered, it came to life (with my call sign and so on) when I plugged it back in to have another look. It’s presently sitting on the windowsill trying to see GPS satellites. 
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Ricardo will you publish here when that is available please. I’ve not been able to use your current software (and had to resort to a G3CWI’s kind support to get the tracker running
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It took quite a while (hours rather than minutes, probably not helped by only seeing, at best, half the sky) to get its first fix, but it is now reporting a good position. Of course,because it’s LoRa and all the iGates in this area aren’t, nothing’s showing on the map. I guess setting up an iGate is the next step. 
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Yes, as you say, in your area you will have to provide your own igate. There’s a chance that if you do so and it’s on 24/7 from a reasonable location others might be encouraged to adopt LoRa. Fortunately it’s really cheap and easy to set up an igate.
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This website shows just LoRa APRS stations: https://lora.ham-radio-op.net/
If you click on a station and select coverage it shows a coverage map for that station which is neat. It’s based on where it has picked up trackers so for new stations it will take a while for it to expand to its full range.
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I’ll probably initially use the white stick, so it won’t be 24/7 as I’ll need the stick if I want to use 2m or 70cm, but the rest of the time an iGate could have it. I’ve a 70cms colinear stashed somewhere that could be pulled out to do the job if I can find some where sane to fix it where I can get the requisite power to it and it can reach the WiFi.
Interesting. There’s too much geography between me and the Newport one over the Severn. Likewise the Cheltenham, Hereford and Leominster ones. The rest are probably too far away, though it might be interesting to go up the hill and see what gives, as Hereford’s has a faint splodge of coverage up there.
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So I set one up, eventually. Temporarily just sitting on a bedroom windowsill.
Though we’re quite high up, the house is in a bit of a hollow with some quite high houses surrounding it.
So far I think it’s picked up one signal, from near Clee Hill.
I had a bit of play around over the weekend, and it seems like it can access the wifi from the area around the pole at the bottom of the garden that my current HF antenna is slung from (though not that high at the moment. I’ll have to look into a battery supply and perhaps a small solar panel to charge it as well as some sort of antenna.
I should have a tracker coming this week, so I should be able to get a better idea about coverage, though I’m not expecting it to be great!
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I am currently buying the parts to make a meshtastic node for siting near the top of Seatallan G/LD-025
I will find a location away from the summit where nobody goes.
I have everything except the solar panel, so looking for suggestions on a model that is likely to provide sufficient energy during a day, more most of the year, to power the node overnight. Any suggestions?
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That word has been bantered around on this thread since the start, did you use Ricardo’s Web installer? I have been taking comfort in that word used by people with more skills than me
Well done and welcome to the iGate world
Tony
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Is it available yet?
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Noticed you’d popped up. Getting great coverage now in Shropshire.
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I played around with both Lora_ARPS and Ricardo’s with Visual Studio Code (In Linux), faffing around with different ‘cards’ before I worked out what was what 
I did eventually go with the web installer, even though it needed Chrome to do it 
Just trying to work out how I can power the thing if I put it up the pole, it’ll have to be some sort of battery/solar malarkey.
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It looks that way!
If I was 100m further north I’d probably have line of sight to a far wider area
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I’ve been using these with my LoRA iGate and digirepeater since March:
I’ve also been using the smaller one (10W) which seems to be pretty good, well made and only £12 at the moment:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0140OO99O/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Do you not fancy putting up a LoRA APRS node at home - an iGate on the West coast of Cumbria would be great for the Western fells where coverage is a little lacking ?
Dave
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Hello dave, Yes I will put one up at home. As I write this, I’m waiting for the installation firmware to download for a unit that arrived today, to use for tx, but will also setup an igate. It would be much more fun to place one atop a hill though.
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Out this evening, and gave the tracker a ride along the way. From Nymsfield it managed to get through to Cardiff, so it clearly emits useful RF. Need to figure out what the buttons do, though…
A web installer for the iGate is a available but last I checked you need VSCode for the tracker.
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Absolutely Matthew. Are you going you going to leave it up there permanently ?
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Web installer is available for iGates, Tracker’s web installer is coming soon, Richardo has been working 24 hours a day to help us all out.
Tony
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