LOL “scares cell carriers” come on now. We all enjoy a bit of clicbait but this is egregious. 😆

As far as I can tell my RAK stores them. Feels like it stores more than 30 but I’m unsure.

US-legal yes. We use them in Canada as well but I haven’t checked if they’re legal here. They can be configured to tx at lower power. Their rx stage is also more sensitive so they’re approx balanced with the 1W tx.

Get a 1W RAK!

Did you wardrive with an external antenna? I don’t read.

When you increase error correction, does the max msg length decrease?

Can one node independently change its coding rate while others haven’t and the error correction benefit take effect? Do all nodes need to have the same setting?

Nice. I was also able to OTA my RAK nodes recently. Slow af indeed.

Anything notable in .18?

Yup. They also state that on the store page. That said, the receiver side is also more sensitive so there’s a benefit there.

Note that the usual caveats for using ROUTER/REPEATER/ROUTER_LATE roles apply. In your case it might be the right compromise.

If you have elevation, you could install two nodes there. One with a yagi towards the other town. The other either with another yagi or an omni for your town’s nodes. Then set both nodes to ROUTER_LATE and add them as favourites to each other. Then your local node would go through the first, hop on the second and then shoot towards the other town. It’ll lose only one hop over the two routers. More info on that. You could also use two CLIENT or CLIENT_BASE roles but you would lose 2 hops.

E: Also get a 1W RAK if you don’t get good signal with your current hardware. I recently bought and tested some and they go markedly further with better signal all else being equal. It’s receiving end is also better.

Yeah. The red-capped connector is the stock SMA, left in place but not connected. I drilled a hole for the N-type using a standard stepped bit. Could also use circular saw of the right size.

In the GTA (Canada) we have a shit ton of nodes but due to the environment it’s very hard to get far before you run out of hops. This node allows many nodes in a 15km radius to talk to each other or bounce to downtown with 1 hop. It’s elevated on a balcony. Also this module has much more sensitive receive stage so the increase in signal strenght is similar in both rx and tx.

The second connector is an unused SMA. That said I was planning to do a 2-node setup with low and high gain antennas, on the opposite ends of the box. 🤭 Fortunately this 5dBi antenna performs well enough for near nodes to not need a low gain supplementation.

RAK Unify, the larger one.

Oh haha, no I just taped it for a pic.

Inside? No. It’s an enclosure for mounting outaide. There are various adapters, bolt to a wall, clamp on a pole, magnets, zip tie to something. The lid of the box is not installed.

Could be a bug.

If it’s a power saving situation, the way to wake it up is to send it a LoRa message. Then Bluetooth connection succeeds. If you have another radio you can DM it.

It means the CPU is sleeping. It does happen when you have power saving enabled. Maybe it happens under other scenarios too.

Low cost and WiFi is my guess.

Fact. I was using the flyer’s framing. Still, a bit more bandwidth and range could make this system a lot more useful. Speaking of range, I ordered some 1W nodes from RAK that should be here in a couple of days. They won’t be as useful as they can be for 2-way comm without the counterparts also being 1W but I’m curious to see how much further I can tx from my balcony. :D