I’m a noobie. I just bought my pair of GoTennas. I’ve noticed people reporting on their range records. However, I haven’t spotted any post talking about the method they use. How do you determine the range?
Thanks for helping me through my growing pains.
I keep a one of mine paired to a tablet and ping it while driving around.
It would be a really cool and useful mode if you could put the gotenna in a “ranging” mode via the app and just drive around. the app would automatically ping the desired node and log the location of successful pings. all of this could be used to create a “heat map” of the area to determine where obstructions cause issues.
Between the standard features in the goTenna Mesh user interface and those added by goTenna Plus, that functionality is already mostly built-in. I haven’t really tried mapping with it, but between the Location Tethering and the Trip Statistics features, they should be able to support you learning more about your goTenna Mesh location’s possible range. More here: https://www.gotenna.com/pages/gotenna-plus
Be aware, if you’ve not much experience, that small changes in location often result in a signal when one doesn’t seem readily apparent. One good way to test this is using the Ping feature, as it will work when the signal isn’t quite strong enough to support messaging. If the ping succeeds, try moving a little and you’ll often be able to connect for a message.
Also, you’ll find the iOS Toolkit available in the App Store has some neat mapping modes, although I haven’t tried it yet. More on it here: https://community.gotennamesh.com/t/ios-toolkit-app/1978
My point was more an automatic ping mode every 5-10 seconds or so, so you wont be “texting” while driving when testing it out. In the woods, manually pressing the ping or using location tethering will work quite well, in the city (at least in Vancouver) that will result in pretty steep ticket.
There’s at least one automatic function among all that, which I think it’s part of the very useful goTenna Plus package. I often find it better for my purposes to simply pull over, as I often document with notes, etc. They’re pretty hardcore on texting and driving locally, so I avoid that.
It’s shortest time span auto-location option is one minute. In part, that because your goTenna is limited to something like 6 outgoing messages/minute for various reasons, including protecting the mesh against abuse and being tied up by a malfunctioning or hacked function.