Sorry, it's my dumb ass again, I've been spamming a lot as I learn.
So, I just got a rooftop node set up at my gf's place.
It is a RAK 3312 ESP32-S3 module (labelled 3112 for some reason), on a 19007 WisBlock base board, coupled with the RAK1906 environment sensor and RAK12002 RTC.
It's connected to a RAK 5.8dbi outdoor antenna via a male-N to MHF-4 connector I special ordered from a different site.
I'm powering it via some 18ga cable down the chimney connected to a RAK 5v power supply, and it has a 2000mah battery alongside it to provide backup power.
Everyone uses longfast here.
Some pics:
spoiler
Now, I am having significantly worse TX/RX performance than I had expected out of a nice aerial. My handheld node, which is a TLORA T3-S3 using some crappy ass 6" long china 915mhz antenna from Aliexpress, was able see a reliable hillside repeater from her driveway. Not with great signal strength since it's around a ridge, but it CAN see it, pretty reliably once in a while.
This node I built, can't see anything. After leaving it on it saw maybe one other node for a little while on bootup, then it disappeared. The reliable hill side node is invisible.
Transmitting on LongFast (our area's default) shows maybe 50-60% of what I send gets out, but basically nothing is ever received. I can sometimes see it's enviro telemetry from my home node through 1 hop, but I can't ever talk back to it. Whereas my handheld node can often hear the reliable hill side node and still talk to my home base.
I tried reflashing it with both stable and alpha firmwares, and while the alpha firmware did increase it's stability and fix some other issues with retransmitting and wifi, I noticed while doing that I get a lot of these red messages in the console complaining about an Error -7 when rx'ing:
Before you jump down my throat, yes I know about high gain antennas having a narrow vertical beam width. 35deg on the RAK (17.5 up/down) should be way more than enough to overcome the ~40m height change between this and any other major node at the distances I am dealing with.
Anyway, I'm at a loss with this stupid hardware, and I don't have any other antennas to really test it with because of the worst connector ever known to man (mhf-4). There's definitely a need for additional nodes between this location and the rest of the mesh, but I expected to achieve some connection considering my handheld seems to be able to.
am open to any ideas for how to diagnose this node's performance. Is it a bad radio, bad antenna, bad connector I bought? Do I just RMA the radio and see if a new one does any better?
Some antenna designs can be a dead short at DC and present a correct RF load. But the one you have is very likely a collinear design with "stacked" elements, which should be open circuit.
Everything else you described sounds normal. So hopefully this is it!
I hope this is it too, my area kinda needs this node haha. I contacted Rokland support to see I'd they had any details on how to test or confirm the antenna was bad, and I'll start an RMA once they come back with some details.