I’ll take another look although pre-field tests went well with the same setup. We weren’t so far though so despite this being a legit possibility of issue, I think signal strength interference due to trees and poor line of sight could be more probable.
Ah yes, I extracted the coordinates of GW and the 2 nodes from my Google Earth project and used the website in this reply:
Re:
We are using TTN so adding this field tester as an end node would be easy. Checked the official guides too. Another idea I had was to program one of the LoRa Portentas to connect to TTN every 30 secs- if successful turn Green LED on and if not turn Red LED on. This could be a make-shift field tester too on the exact device (and antenna) that we are interested in using for the project.
yeah, I made a pair of stand alone units.
Small OLED screen, gps, ESP32 and LoraWan module in debug mode. Then when I press the button it sends its local GPS data to the remote unit, which then will auto reply with its GPS location data. The Lora radio module gave me a signal stregth and SNR, so I could see if it was getting stronger or weaker.
I would also try a higher spread factor (default in AU is normally 7, but 12 means it will attempt to extract more signal over more of the “spread” (at the cost of speed)
You should be able to check this using your phone. Make sure GPS is enabled and remove the phone from any protective case in case there is a magnetic clip or anything that might upset the result.
I would still check a Google earth profile as that web site I think is geared toward North America and might think Tasmania is the end of the earth.
Following is a google earth profile of one path. They agree more or less and both show a bulge at the Node 1 end which might not be apparent to the naked eye but is in the interference area so it looks like you would be better off elevating the Node end to get over that slight bulge. Elevation at the Gateway end I don’t think is going to make a great difference for this path.
