Repeater Node V3

The team has taken inspiration from individuals on the Northern Rivers Trip in this latest repeater node design. John Hutchinson was the brains behind these repeaters, emphasising a low cost and reliable design.

As above, we produced two of these repeaters, each with a different size casing (for mounting flexibility). They use a rigid 915mhz antenna - significantly larger in size than our previous repeaters, and a 6V solar panel.

A notable difference to previous repeaters is the addition of this external solar charge controller. In V1 and V2 the inbuilt MPPT solar charge controller on the RAK4631 was used to regulate solar input. Here, an external charge controller was chosen to reduce the amount of current and hence heat going through the RAK board. Time will tell if adding this extra component is in fact worthwhile

The repeater uses the same battery and LoRa board as previous designs. They will be tested alongside v2 and v1 repeaters to judge performance differences.