I have recently received my Heltec HTCC-AB01 868~915 after significant shipping delays. I followed the Quick Start guide from Heltec to install the Arduino board manager.
I have configured the tools menu like this:
I have registered the device on TTN for OTAA with randomly generated EUI’s. I edited the LoRaWan example to include my devEui, appEui, and appKey. I can successfully upload this program to the board and see the fields as such from the terminal.
The board will try to join but fails and retrys every 30 seconds.
First things first, does the join request appear on the web console.
How far away from the gateway is the device - less than 10m or so and it can overload the input stages of radios with the strong signal. A brick wall is good, I put things behind my hugely Gucci radio shield - my iMac.
Do the simplest test - ABP - to verify uplinks, then do one downlink from the console to verify reception.
And then check the docs for any endian-ness of the various keys for OTAA.
And please can you turn off confirmed links - they impact the local gateways uplink reception and as a community network we ask you think about the absolute necessity of using them.
I don’t have my own gateway and according to maps the nearest one is ~2km away, according to he maps I’m within range, is this the most likely culprit i will have to go out and try somewhere else.
I’ve setup ABP and the device is “unconfirmed uplink sending …” none of which are being detected in the console above.
The filters are set to show only errors - whilst just getting started, best to leave them all turned on - aka white not grey.
Depending on how good your antenna is, where it is, where the gateway’s antenna is and if it’s turned on, your mileage may vary, a lot.
Check using http://TTNMapper.org to see when the gateway as last active and then find somewhere near to hand you can try your device. If you are in Europe in a public area, be careful - testing a radio device will make people nervous at present. [Before anyone thinks this is a bit over the top, it’s 4th Nov 2020 and some of my work gives me an insight in to security issues]
Also check on the TTN Communities page to see if there is a local community - one of the gateway owners may be able to check their logs to see if anything is being received
But I’d start with getting closer to a known active gateway.
There are much better antennas. I would recommend an antenna with an active lenght of 1/2 lambda, in your case this is abt. 0.15m. These antennas have a gain of 2dBi like a dipole antenna. Every antenna which is shorter will work but is a compromise between length and gain.
For EU868 these antennas are sold for under 10 Euro, total length is 0.2m.
yes, this is the antenna I use with my TTGO T-Beam. They show rather good results concerning VSWR and resonance frequency. I could not measure the radiation pattern, the ( theoretical) gain is abt. 2 dBi.
But this antenna is designed for 868MHz, I don’t know how it behaves at 915 MHz.
