Last night we had a discussion at Basingstoke Makerspace where the IMST Lite Gateway has been recently relocated, and as a result a number of new members joined our TTN Community. The new gateway situation should already give better signal to a wider area, as the gateway has been sited up until now with an indoors antenna in a building in the valley that is Winchester Road, so the coverage was very limited. Now the antenna is at least on a first storey flat roof near the top of a slope in the town centre.
There has been extra interest as we have an ongoing project to produce some Air quality sensors using wifi, but would like to extend that to use LoRa. This is quite a research and learning opportunity as none of us has produced such a system before.
One of our new members, Kevin, has a (different) Gateway on order which is due to arrive in the next month or so, and another of our new members lives at a highpoint just to the South West of Basingstoke, so there could be a good opportunity to massively improve coverage across Basingstoke, which would be great for the air quality sensor project, but also great for developing the Basingstoke TTN Community.
Together with the town centre coverage from the IMST Lite Gateway, such a high-ground siting should provide a lot of general coverage. Looking at the coverage map on ttnmapper.org, the high ground is apparently just within the reach of one of the gateways at Caversham Heights and the one at Winchester, so it clearly is a high ground with good wide-area coverage that should also take in large parts of Basingstoke...
... we will see soon, I hope...
