I just did my first range test, and it appeared to go really well. Got at least a half mile away and still saw 25-50% signal on the OLED. Until I got back and noticed that none of the test messages I’d been sending were visible on the receiving device.
Here’s the scenario, Tablet is paired with stationary TBeam, Phone is paired with roaming TBeam:
- Left the house on 111th, sent a message from Phone, “1 driveway”, saw checked cloud icon in chat
- Walked west, sent “2 110th”
- Sent “3 109th”
- Sent “4 white fence”
… - Sent “10 104th”
All messages appeared on Phone with checked cloud icon. The purpose, of course, was to see which messages failed to arrive, at what point did the test begin to fail.
At the end of the street I locked the Phone and powered OFF the roaming TBeam, walked back home.
When coming in, I noticed that the stationary TBeam had finally gotten a GPS lock while I was gone (saw the blinking red as soon as I came in the door), so walked straight back outside to see how the map works. Didn’t unlock the Tablet nor touch its TBeam.
Powered on the roaming TBeam, unlocked the Phone, waited for a “Good” GPS indicator, sent “111 driveway”. Walked east, sending “222 112th” and “333 113th,” saw the checked cloud on each. Switched tabs to see both devices on the map. “Neat, cool, now I’m done for the night.” Powered off the roaming TBeam again, powered off the Phone this time, walked home.
When returning home and unlocking the Tablet, ONLY the 111, 222 and 333 messages were visible in the chat app, none from the prior test were there.
Am I misunderstanding what the checked cloud beside each message means? Were none of the messages actually making it back home? I don’t think this is the case, since the second set of messages were there, and the prior set of messages did include some that were as close to home as the second set.
Did powering off the roaming TBeam somehow “reset” the chat window on the stationary Tablet? I don’t think this is the case either, as I did power it off before walking home the first time too.
Any tips? I guess I need to try it again, this time with someone sending ACKs back to me from the Tablet as I walk. But kinda sad; what started out as “wow, this thing is sending messages quite a distance, I’m excited!” turned into “WTF happened??”