There’s an issue in for the battery percentage indication: Incorrect/Intermittent power sensing on RAK4630 boards · Issue #815 · meshtastic/Meshtastic-device · GitHub
My range with the stock RAK antennas has been pretty pitiful. I don’t think these work very well. I think the Bluetooth antennas reach further. I’ll try to switch to my Linx antennas this week and see how they do on these boards.
I’ve gotten up to 12.2km with a RAK-4631 board and this antenna on a tower:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/linx-technologies-inc/ANT-916-MHW-SMA-S/1589847
I did cut a lot of the excess coax off and re-crimp a new SMA connector on.
I don’t think the stock PCB antennas were meant to work over that sort of range. Best to upgrade to a well tuned commercial antenna like the linx that has decent gain.
@KevinKW87 what kind of range do you get with BLE. Right now I can only connect my Android Phone when I’m about 10-15ft away from the board. Is that a normal range? Any farther than that, the device doesn’t show up. (RAK 4631).
I would say that is around normal. I think I maybe see 20ft with the stock antennas. BLE isn’t meant to go much further than 30ft.
So one of my boards is doing well as I was able to pick up a stationary node 26km away.
The other one seems to be having range problems of some sort. It meshes when it is around 20ft of the other device, but loses it after that. I have traded antennas, but that didn’t do it.
I’m not quite sure if it’s a hardware or software problem as support for these boards is still new.
Just got my unit in which is cool. Looking forward to leading MT and seeing what happens!
Anyone know if solar works right yet?
I just dumped mine out in the sun to see how long it runs. It has no GPS module installed, just LORA (I only need it as a node).
I can say battery status in the Android app still seems dead in .40.
Time for range testing!
Updates:
Build quality and packaging seems really good. This is an excellently built unit from the standpoint of aesthetics and design. Also, very economical once you put the the whole solar kit together vs cobbled together T-Beams.
I had to pull the JST pins from my amazon batteries and swap them. Polarity was for sure off - did not make the mistake of toasting a board thanks to the folks here.
Solar works right I think. I’m going for some long period testing, but the unit can be powered off just the solar panel which is promising. I don’t have GPS installed so that cuts power usage.
The stock antenna is hilarious and strange. The SWR is 10. However, in my testing of the units with a TLORA antenna with much better SWR range dropped a good bit with the TLORA antenna.
Battery indication is still toast
Finally, something is wrong with my units or the code. On LongSlow, FW .39, Android .40…I get 800m before signal is gone. Thats it. And signal closer to the units is very bad anyway. At 100m its -20. Both units do this. One unit with stocker antenna and one with TLoRA and pigtail.
Next week I will attempt a deep dive into the units state/code/etc to see if it will tell me anything useful about whats going on.
Did some more testing.
Test Setup (915mhz):
3x RAK 1631’s, no GPS, 1 with the antenna from a TLORA factory kit. SWR measured at 1.5
2 of the RAK’s are powered from LIPO’s with solar, 1 is a USB battery pack.
All RAK firmware is .39
1x T-beam, factory bigger antenna, FW .39
1x TLORA 1.0, factory antenna FW .38
Channel is a custom channel, Long/Slow
All android apps are .40
RAK-RRH has the better antenna. It died at 300m.
RAK-RNM has the factory antenna as does the bare-box RAKBARE. Both died at 200m.
Both TTGO devices have strong signal and are operating normally.
Systems were still powered after a night of operation. Solar may be working. One solar unit is left out there for testing.
Thanks for posting these results. I’ve had similar results with the RAK 4631 with several antennas. What could be causing this?
Software wise? It would have to be something wrong with radio library. Maybe having to do with TXPower or how the radio reports signal.
Hardware wise? Poor quality control on the radio module, either its antenna feed or the chip itself.
I’m going to try default channels next.
Reset everything to defaults - standard channel/etc. No help. TTGO systems are still good to go in the testing, RAK did not have any effect.
@KevinKW87 just out of curiosity, what is the configuration of the stationary node you were able to pick up from 26km away? What board picked up the stationary node? Is it a RAK 4631 as well? Thanks in advance
Yep! It was a 4631 with a Linx HW antenna.
I had a pair of T-Beams of the most recent revision for months and they didn’t pick up any extra nodes with the same antennas.
@KevinKW87 are you on the Long-slow channel as well? You also mentioned earlier that one of your RAK boards didn’t work as well. Any progress or findings on that?
Sorry for all the questions. I really really like this RAK board. I’m just not getting the range I should be.
Yep, on the default long-slow channel.
No progress on the one that isn’t working well. I traded antennas with the one that I know is working well and that didn’t solve it. I’ve been thinking of how to wipe the bootloader and firmware and start fresh, but I haven’t figured out how to do that.
There has been some discussion in the ATAK discord that if you used the stock PCB antennas that came with the RAK package, that may have damaged the TX/RX chip (as everything else seems to work).
I may just get another set and use my known good antennas.
Ahhh interesting…I might reach out to RAK support and see if they’ve had people report similar issues with the PCB antenna.
Thanks for the reply
I’ve shelved my four WisBlocks hoping they’d receive more refinement in firmware support.
It seems the new epaper boards have all the attention currently.
Frequent shut offs/freezes made mine unusable.
That would be a shame indeed. the build quality of the RAK boards is higher than the TTGO t-beams, where two out of the four I have running have failed, probably due to bad solder joints somewhere. The RAK boards have been running continuously with no such problems.
I’m talking to a dev over there on the RAK side. Its hard to tell right now if this is a MT issue or RAK issue.
If I had to guess I’d say something is wrong with the TXpower setup.
A couple excerpts from my correspondence with RAK:
"The PCB antennas coming with the RAK4631 are for evaluation only and do not have the best performance. They are designed to cover a wide frequency range (~800 to 960MHz). Their performance depends as well on where you located them, they should be placed away from the PCB’s and any metal parts inside the enclosure. "
When I asked them specifically if these antennas have been known to damage the transceiver they said it wasn’t a known issue with this board.
The Dev I talked with suggested that maybe it could have something to do with the initialization of the transceiver . From RAK Dev:
"Same for BLE, as I said earlier, it seems they do not set the TX power explicitly, you need to talk to [Meshtastic] directly. If they do use a different LoRa library than we, there can be many causes, like wrong TX power, wrong control of the RF antenna switch.
I have WisBlock system using the PCB antenna and with direct line of view achieved easily 700++ meters."
I’m not sure if explicitly setting LoRA TX power is the issue because in digging through the code I think I see where it is explicitly set.
Perhaps there’s another issue with initialization?
