Practical Range Test Results

Copying this useful comment from the devchat slack (so it doesn’t get lost):

" Placed a Lilygo T-beam a waterproof junction box, with 20000mah battery bank on top of a local mountain, using a 1/2 wave 868mhz omni directional antenna, I got a range of 30km, which was impressive."

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Did some more tests, endpoint(red) stationary, powered, using GSM omnidirectional antennas (800-900Mhz) on all 3 nodes. connection acheived node1-2 andnode 1-3(while node 2 was offline) Node 2 was mobile during the test and I had connection with it all the way from its start at 12Km to I lost line of sight due to a mountain at 19.4Km. total range with 3 nodes where the middle node was high up the mountain side : 36 Km

view from middle to endpoint, just where the water stops at the left side.
view from middle to startpoint, just at the horizon

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Got 5km using a TTGO on the roof of my house (it’s up on a hill) and drove around with an antenna with a magnetic mount on my car. Used “long range but slower”. It could have easily gone further, but there was a hill in the way.

The antenna is two for $13 on Amazon.

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I got about 1km with no line of site with standard antenna. One in my car and 1 on the roof of a 2 story building.

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Using TBeams I’ve been able to get approximately 2km radius with no line of sight in a medium density urban setting (area with houses and a few condominium buildings).

Within a concrete building I was able to get messages sent approximately 7-8 floors high and a few floors underground.

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Just to add to the log. A 24km test result with a sx1262 here.

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Got 43.2Km using these 20dBi Yaggi on each of the two T-Beams. The geography helped a lot.

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What channel settings did you use? Did you try any others?

@mc-hamster Longest range/lowest speed… didn’t test other channels, because the radio on top of the big hill is REALLY HARD to access, so I doubt we’ll be returning there anytime soon to be able to test different channels.

Really wish there was a way to remotely access nodes.

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Remote access is coming soon ish (this month). Needed to add security levels first.

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So I wanted to properly stretch the legs of the sx1262 on 868mhz.
I will let the photos do the talking






Very impressive.

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Super impressive. I think the record I’ve seen is 98km but that was with a directional antenna. Your results with an omni are super encouraging.

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Cheers :slight_smile:
I was amazed how usable it was even at that range that message didn’t take long to send and get confirmation.
I don’t suppose LORA OTA updates could work for a repeater node? I might be able to put one of these on a mountain but access would be a rare thing.

OTA update could be possible in the future, if the node is connected to a faster network. This could be done accessing the web server, on the node, trough 3/4/5G modem, VPN, and WLAN connection. However, firmware update features are usually more tricky to achieve, than anticipated.

@mc-hamster, how about a firmware update feature on the web interface?

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Anyone tried this moxon? I’m intrigued by the results of the AliExpress one, but I hate that shipping wait time.

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Sure. Don’t know why this hasn’t come up before.

Please open a feature request on our GitHub.

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Does this mean the ability to set protobufs over the mesh?

btw - I wrote a nice http based firmware updater for ESP32 in a different open-source project. It would be not too hard for someone to move it into this one. I can provide links/tips in the bug if anyone wants to give it a go,

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Is it much different than Espressif’s updater?

I’m heads down trying to fix the cause of the crashing when uploading large files. That’ll be a pre-requisite to a web firmware update.