At the top of this topic, under LoRa Performance, it is said:
The LoRa performance of the Heltec and TTGO boards has shown to be sub-optimal. Important factors are the quality of the RF circuitry (design) and the antennas.
There is a things network gateway some 300m distant from my node. It reliably receives uplink data. But about half of downlink data packets were lost. My node was often not hearing the gatweay.
For my TTN node I have a TTGO LoRa32 V1 with the small helical antenna pictured here.
To optimize performance I have found:
- the antenna is best laid horizontal rather than
stood upright - a virtical quarter wave stub should be attached at the antenna mount.
This picture shows the arrangement
With these optimizations, the uplink SNR values are improved on average by about 10dB, and the downlink SNR is improved by about 11dB (LMIC values divided by 4). Both uplink and downlink are now adequately reliable. Typically uplink SNR is about +6dB and downlink SNR is about +3dB (LMIC values divided by 4)