This is using a 12V nominally 10W panel…the low power firmware sounds interesting, power consumption is my main issue at the moment.
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Yes thats why I designed everything with one battery and solar panel max 6V.
and its cheaper too in total. Will speak with Ricardo then I’m publishing the firmware.
What controllers are u using so we would need to add yours.
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Can I commend this pull for low power? It’s pretty amazing. The quiescent current for my igate has fallen from 70mA plus to less than 20mA. Building a LoRa APRS 439Mhz iGate (Part 2) - #5 by M5RJC
It still has the “blank screen” problem but as the WiFi AP works, it not really a problem. There is now a suggested fix for the blank screen on Github.
I hope to have my Earl Sterndale digipeater back in the field today or tomorrow. It will have a Waveshare MPPT charger and the @M5RJC low power firmware. I have some MOSFETs arriving tomorrow to make a night switch but it’s possible that might not be needed now.
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That looks good, I had resorted to physically disconnecting the screen on one of my boards, but this is a much more elegant solution!
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How did you do the coverage prediction, Richard? Can you do one for G3WGV-11?
I suspect that Matthew’s digipeater coverage on LD-025 will be very complementary to mine on GDF, between them covering pretty well all of Cumbria, northern Lancashire and south west Scotland. Not bad for two digipeaters!
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Great Dun Fell (mine) using free Nautel online tool. Prediction limited to 150km. The GB3VE people have this coverage plot on their website. It’s not believable for all sorts of reasons.
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My ‘ready to go’ tracker from Richard arrived a couple of days ago (21.08.2024 f/w) and is also stuck in a boot loop.
I’ll leave it connected to USB power and see if it comes to life. I’m very new to APRS and LoRa so I may well have dumb questions going forward. I’m heading to mid and north Wales tomorrow and will take my tracker up a hill or two if I can ever get it to work.
Cheers,
Denis MW0CBC
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Feel free to send it back to me and I can reflash it. The current firmware I’m using seems to be more stable. I’m doing some testing to try to understand why this is happening. Alternatively you could try reflashing it yourself and just pop it back if you don’t have any success.
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Nice work Julian, where is it? I’ve just switched on an iGate in Gargazzone jn56oo
Maybe I can try to reach it with my tracker
73 de IN3AQK
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Cheers, Richard. It’s no real issue. I’ll have my Garmin Inreach unit with me on this trip for spotting if I end up anywhere without a ‘phone signal.
I’m sure I can re-flash it myself when you do get to the bottom of the issue but I’ll need to work out how to do that. As I said, it’s all very new to me 
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JN66AT
If you are high up maybe 
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Now that looks like a useful tool. I shall play with the settings to see if I can get a green coverage blob over southern Arran! I suspect the coverage is pessimistic due to the spread spectrum nature of LoRa.
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Just a quick update, as others have found, if I power it up connected to USB power, it eventually boots correctly and continues to run when power is disconnected.
Time to have a play 
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It seems Ricardo CA2RXU is very close to having a web flasher/installer finished for the Lora tracker. He mentions on his GitHub site, that he is currently dedicating his time to writing and testing the software for the tracker web flasher.
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Many, many years of embedded programming would make me look for…
- a race hazard between initing some hardware and declaring a failure. i.e. takes longer to init than allowed for
- an uninitialized variable that sometimes comes up in the right state and the code boots else it reboots, lather-rinse-repeat
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Thanks. I’ll keep an eye on that.
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Will a purple one do?
https://lora.ham-radio-op.net/ lets you show the coverage for an iGate or digipeater which is based on where it has actually received packets from.
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The purple one is very satisfying and has the distinct advantage of being actual data points rather than predicted. Unfortunately the lora.ham algorithm discards historical data points quite quickly, which means that the coverage map’s accuracy is dependent on regular updates. Too few trackers up here for that!
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