Northern area and expansion of Chiltern Hills AONB Coverage

Jeff-UK

The Things Network User

Posted on 05-03-2019

Anyone monitoring the community coverage map in recent months will have noticed a new outpost at the northern limit of our planned gateway positioning & coverage map with Wendover and the surrounding district now covered.

We were fortunate to get the chance to deploy 2 temporary GW's early/mid Jan - one close to Wendover Rail Station (indoor - office block by window looking north), the other close to the northern edge of the town (attic space of 2 story building - indoor arial). The latter remains in place as a semi-permanent deployment with expectations that antenna will move outdoors and 2-3m higher to improve coverage.

Placing gateways around here is part of a forward looking plan to extend coverage by dovetailing and overlapping the BE&C Community and its coverage of the Chiltern Hills AONB & escarpment with the new planned community for Aylesbury & Mid-Bucks
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Whilst much of the area immediately around the sites is raised to the south - providing good scope for coverage on the rising slope but reducing range beyond 1-3km, to the north the land goes into a small dip reducing coverage beyond ~Stoke Mandeville, with much of Aylesbury town rising higher on a small hill and with higher ground east, west and north/north-east of the town. We were hopefull for coverage at these higher points and that is exactly what we saw :-)
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As noted we saw several tracker 'pings out to 10-12km, with the tree diagramme/map below showing a greater range of some of the points where coverage was confirmed
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Within Wendover town itself and along the surrounding major roards, closer in to the monitoring gateways, there were few locations where we could not get coverage, which bodes well for future device & GW roll-out programmes.
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Once the remaining Wendover Gateway has its antenna position optimised we will start to look at more detailed mapping to the south into the CHAONB area itself as well as start looking at additional higher sites along the escarpment; west towards Princes Risborough and east towards Tring......if you want to volunter a site please contact us as we have equiment ready and potentially available!

Please keep vising the community page in the coming weeks & months as we look to test further and report the results....