It is failing to boot up? This seems to be a common problem with the Heltec Wireless Tracker boards at the moment. You can usually make it boot eventually by leaving it connected and charging. It will go through the boot loop a few hundred times and then start. It can take over an hour. Once it’s working don’t switch it off or reset it or you are back to square one.
For building your own there are lots of tips on the Wiki. Hardware Choices - Setting up and using LoRa APRS for SOTA
Its a T-Beam v1 and found the problem after I disconnected it from my bag noticed it rattling. re soldered and added some padding, all seems fine again although still looking at buying some more kit to play with, as one iGate and one tracker is never enough 
I will have some more of the other trackers available this week. Cheaper than you could buy the parts (probably).
G3WGV-10 iGate & G3WGV-11 Digipeater QRV
I am pleased to announce that the G3WGV-10 iGate at my home QTH, IO84QN, has today been joined by Digipeater G3WGV-11 at IO84SQ. Collocated with the GB3EV/GB3VE repeaters, G3WGV-11 is close to the summit of Great Dun Fell in the northern Pennines, at a height AMSL of 685m. The QTH offers commanding views over the Eden Valley, much of the Lake District, south west Scotland and northern Lancaster.
https://lora.ham-radio-op.net/?center=54.6336,-2.521&zoom=12
Collocating with a 70cm repeater was a challenge! There is almost no front end selectivity on these LoRa devices so it has been necessary to build a high-Q filter, which reduces the GB3VE signal on 433.1MHz by around 77dB.
Because the site is just below the summit of Great Dun Fell the Digipeater uses a 3 element vertically polarised Yagi, which produces some gain in useful directions and avoids warming up the hillside behind with RF. You can see the Digipeater antenna here, below the GB3EV 2m antenna
G3WGV-11 has been quite costly and time-consuming to implement. It is very much experimental so I am keen to learn how well it works. Please do consider taking a tracker with you when perambulating around the Lake District or driving around Cumbria and south west Scotland The more tracker activity the better I will be able to assess the Digipeater’s performance.
73, John, G3WGV
Thanks for going to all the effort of building and installing this John. As you know LoRa APRS coverage has been a little sparse in the North West; so a APRS digi on GDF at 800+ m will help enormously… I’ll be up in the Lake District in a few weeks time, so will definitely be taking the tracker out with me.
Dave
Fantastic, getting that up there. Great job!
That amused me. I wonder if it’s measurable, or in scientific terms, negligible?
That looks great John - thanks! It will be interesting to see how it works out.
On the subject of trackers, I have the last one of this batch left. Anyone heading for the Lakes interested? £43 delivered ready to use. UK activators only. DM me.
Assume an isotropic radiator radiating a 30m radius sphere. Assume the power is 100mW continuous. The energy in Watts per square metre will be 8.84x10e-6 W/m^2. In 1 hour this equates to 0.032 Joules
Assume the energy is completely absorbed by a wet earth surface with a specific heat capacity of 1480 J/kg/C (wet earth). Assume that there is 1000kg of wet earth /m^2. Assume a starting temperature of 20C. Assume no other heat losses. The rise in temperature will be 2.16e-8 C.
I have no doubt made lots of errors and false assumption here. Someone with more time can do it properly.
This might be measurable. World's most sensitive thermometer developed - The Economic Times
Thanks for sorting this out John. Your home iGate was picking me up well last time I was in G/LD so this should give excellent coverage.
I always take a tracker with me now. I was up on my local summit G/NP-028 yesterday and, although I wasn’t picked up by my iGate while on the summit, I was picked up over a much greater area previously. Not sure why the difference.
All we need now is improved software so I can send spots from my Android phone.
For those looking at solar powered LoRa infrastructure, this board might be useful?
That’s an interesting looking module for all sorts of applications. Tempted to get one just to play with! Looks like the 18650 battery holder just wires the batteries is parallel, which could be interesting if they are at different charge levels!
I have a number of USB power packs which wire the 18650s like that. 3 cells in parallel (quite heavy duty connections) with a USB powered charge controller/inverter. For the level of mismatch I’ve seen from cells after they have powered an 817 or KX2, the current flow between the cells when you parallel them isn’t much.
But I did have an interesting effect with an Ikea NiMH charger and Ikea brand NiMHs. The charger takes 2xAA and is USB powered. I’ve been using them to power the GPS for a good few years now, well over 5. A LED lights when charging and goes out when done. I noticed 1 pair of cells would cause the LED to flash after a few hours charging. I have other cells so left these out of use. I finally measure the voltages and 1 cell was 0.2V less than the other. Does it not like the imbalance was my thought. I charged each cell seperately and they both charged to the same terminal voltage. Flashing LED not been seen since, the charger didn’t like the imbalance.
In other news it’s interesting watching GM0PEB-4 driving round in Arran today. Yesterday he climbed Goat Fell and was tracked all the way up from sea level. Impressive.
Even better, G3WGV-11 on Great Dun Fell has just picked up GM0PEB-4 at a distance of 196.6km, so it looks like it’s working!
Looking at the data on APRS.fi shows more success from GDF.
Remarkable! My biggest concern was that G3WGV-11 would be rather deaf due to the noisy RF environment on GDF but it seems that my hi-Q filter design is doing its job filtering the crud out.
I’m curious as to why the statistics are different on aprs.fi vs. lora.ham-radio-op.net. Presumably must be a result of different filtering, because the underlying aprs database is, surely, the same?
Regardless, it’s good to know that the system works in an arc from 193° through 303° at least.
My igate in Kilcreggan picked him up, MM0ZFG-10
This was the board I used for the Mk1 version of my solar powered digipeater. I’ve not done any proper measurements, but I am getting the impression that the smaller MPPT boards are more efficient.
I was using the USB-C output to power the Heltec board via the Hetec USB-C socket. For the smaller MPPT boards I am connected to the battery header on the Heltec, and seem to get better results.
The West Cumbria digipeater has been re-installed on its hilltop position, after testing the MPPT board and fixing some issues with RFI into the Heltec. The new version is shown in the image below and works much, much better than the DC-DC converter I was using previously for connecting the solar panel.
One further problem I am having, with the August build of the iGate/digipeater firmware is that the option to automatically turn off the screen and the WiFi access point seem to not work - both he screen and access point seem to be constantly active.
If the new unit manages a month of uptime, I will have the confidence to re-locate to the summit of G/LD-025. I was camping on the summit on Friday night, and scouted out a couple of possible locations. It was a very windy night, but lots of fun… G2SM was camping near the stretcher box on Mickledore, just below the summit of G/LD-001 so we had a good chat during the evening.
Hello Matthew,
yes this looks good! Using almost the same setup. Are u charging now with an 6V solar panel?
Bought this solar charge module too, but need to test it.
I’m using a different firmware made with Ricardo. It has a low power mode and u can use a small solar panel with 2.5W @5-6V and a single 18650.
Maybe u could use also a smaller one. I got one with 1.2W need to test it during winter months.
The Digipeater is running now almost one month without any problems.
