A couple of my friends had their gotenna eat through batteries in
a maybe 4 hours or so. They both had their devices zipped inside the top pouch of their pack, whereas the rest of us had our devices attached to the outside of our packs and we got normal ~24 hour life. Maybe it burns more juice when it is having to work hard to get a UHF or Bluetooth signal?
That sounds strange.
Did your friends have fully charged units?
Based on everything I currently know placement of you’re Gotenna Mesh should have no impact on the battery life of the device. They are not set up in the same way a cell phone is so they will not increase radio power to compensate for poor reception. At least not the main transceiver.
Does anyone know if the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) standard could have an effect? IE: Will placement relative to the phone effect battery life?
I would guess the devices were used for the first time during this trip and were not properly charged before hand.
EDIT: The first extended use.
EDIT2: I can’t imagine BLE being the issue but does the Mesh switch to regular Bluetooth when the phone does not support BLE?
Hopefully @Rahul_Subramany can answer the BLE questions.
Did they get any prompts on their phone that the GoTenna was disconnected? My thinking is maybe the Bluetooth signal kept dropping out, causing multiple reconnects and LEDs flashing almost constantly.
Short answer - No.
goTenna Mesh only works with phones that support Bluetooth Low Energy.
How far a phone is away from goTenna Mesh shouldn’t affect battery life. goTenna Mesh does not vary Bluetooth transmit power based on signal strength (~range).
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Thanks for clearing that up!
Okay. Will chalk this up as unknown for now and report back if we notice it again sometime.
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@Rahul_Subramany My goTenna has been off for a few days and the battery held a charge of around 80% when I turned it off. Upon turning the device on today, the indicator said the battery was only 6% charged. Is this behaviour normal?
If you’re on the new firmware it is probably something with the new firmware/app. I’ve noticed since the upgrade that the Android app is not reporting accurate battery level. There is a discussion about this in another recent thread. But it is more likely it was not 80% when it was shut off. The only way to reliably get an accurate reading is when connecting to the mesh. So stop the app, turn the mesh off, then on and reconnect to the app before turning off.
Hey there! Thanks for posting this. Since you’ve mentioned the battery depletion occurred when the device was left off, I don’t think this pertains to the firmware at all. I’m glad to provide more help on this. I’ll send you a DM!
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Thanks for the help you guys! I’ll give all of it a try.
(For what it’s worth, the goTenna app had not been running on my phone since I turn of the Mesh. The 6% battery report came after I turned the Mesh on and re-started the app.)
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As a reference point, I just brought one of the backup GTMs in from the truck. I put it there about 10 days ago (maybe longer) after charging it to serve as a backup in case of need while I was doing some network maintenance on various nodes. It shows 97% charge still.
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I’m starting to think it was a one-off glitch. I charged it up and let it rest for a day. When I powered it up, it was at around 98%. I then used it on and off for a few days and it appeared to be draining normally … About to charge the device up for another go!
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