I have 20+ HTCC-AB01 boards working in a forest in Wales as part of a rainfall measuring experiment, all reporting to gateways within the forest, except for when they decide to report to a gateway over 70km away!
I recently purchased three new boards, and recieved HTCC-AB01-v2 boards,(the ones with USB-C type connectors). On setting up these boards I find that the range is abysmal, 5m maximum.
Have i recieved a ‘bad batch’ of boards - or is this normal?
Whatever happens i will be sending these boards back to the supplier!!
HTCC-AB01-v2 range
What you using for the rainfall sensor?
I experimented with one of the plastic tipping buckets type and found it very inaccurate so looking for a better idea.
I don’t know what the v2 board changes were, but I would swap the antenna with one that you think is working better. It would be easy to ship the wrong antenna. All of the RF is inside the CubeCell container so not much you can debug with that.
The other thing I notice looking at the photos on the website is a LF HF set of solder jumper pads. They are at the bottom of the board if you were holding the USB connector on the top. Compare that between the different boards you have. There is no mention in the Schematic of what that might be but since they sell different frequency boards this might be related to that.
Looking at the datasheet they show LF is the 470-510 Mhz and HF 863-928 version. I think the difference is how the antenna circuitry is tuned but the Lora chipset will transmit on the entire range and the only difference is the external antenna tuning.
@dstacer
I’m using Rainwise rw111 Tipping buckets. They’re pretty solid, but during my investigation I’ve found that two buckets situated a metre apart can give very different results (the two are different brands and vastly different price points) as a result of the purely random nature of rain! But that’s not a discussion for here!
Having spoken to Heltech, I think I’ve found the issue, there doesn’t seem to be a component on the HF solder pads. I’m going to try and find the transmission using rtl_433 to confirm!
Hmmm, interesting, the boards are transmitting at around 868, but the signal send a lot weaker than the v1 boards.
