I’m just wondering are there any new cheaper products out? What’s currently the best way to generate a coverage map? To my knowledge it was using https://ttnmapper.org/ and a correctly formatted payload: https://ttnmapper.org/faq/
I’m working on a modular device - the thing I want to add is SD Card and the ability to switch to point 2 point with another similar device at the other end so if there isn’t gateway, you can emulate one.
That kind of device/product definitely makes sense. I’m just a bit surprised that there’s no more recent and cheaper product than the one from Adeunis in French…I’ve expected there would be something from RAKwireless or dragino. anyways, I’m thrilled about your development, please contact me once it’s finished.
I did write something for doing that a while back.
The transmitter sent out a sequence of packets at decending power, and the receiver logged them to SD, so you could tell the exact failure point, i.e. how much power it took to make the link. You had RSSI\SNR logged as well.
The receiver (with the SD card) had a OLED display, which as well as displaying packet data, also gave you the SD log number. Hit reset and you got a new log, so you could note the location where the logs were taken. Log was in CSV format.
The cheapest thing to do is to use a smartphone for the mapping part.
At a crude level, simple time coordination with a node that transmits independently could be post-processed for a “take a coverage walk” type of thing.
A slight step up is to have a node with BLE which can inform the phone each time it transmits so that you can get an exact geographic fix for each uplink packet’s frame count value.
Potentially the phone could get live feedback from TTN… at that point you can do time fixes for the packets that get through even without any local connection between the node and the phone, but you’d have to fill in the locations where packets were missed on based expected time, or with the local node-phone link.
My recollection is that people have built some of this…