Qui adest, habetwho is present, has
The wallet holds the money.
The bookkeeper is the one that earns it.
What a bookkeeper is
A small box that stays on. It keeps the book, it does the radio work, and it never holds a penny. The money lives on the wallet in your pocket, which is the entire reason the two are different things.
It is the half that earns. A wallet with no bookkeeper in range is a real wallet holding nothing.
What you need
- A Raspberry Pi 4. The 2 GB one is plenty.
- A Waveshare SX1262 868/915M LoRaWAN HAT. About thirty dollars.
- A microSD card, a power supply, and somewhere by a window.
Get the SPI one, not the UART one. Waveshare sell two things with almost the same name. The one you want lets the Pi drive the radio directly. The other runs its own firmware and sits in the way, and it is useless for this. If the listing says UART, it is the wrong one.
Two things that will cost you a day if you skip them
- The antenna must not sit on the box. Not beside it, not on top of it. Get it off and away. We lost an entire afternoon to a hat reading 16 to 20 dB worse than a bare board lying next to it, and killed five other theories before this was the answer.
- Antenna on before power, every time. Transmitting into nothing sends the power back into the radio.
Where the two of them go
This is what decides whether your first night earns anything, and it is not what anybody guesses.
About three metres apart, same room, clear line of sight, both on wall plugs. Then walk away for an hour.
- Side by side on one desk earns nothing. Too close and the signal is a perfect unchanging shout, with nothing left to disagree about. It looks like the healthiest link you have ever seen and it pays zero.
- Through a wall earns nothing either, and this one is nastier, because it looks alive. One interior wall was enough here. You will still see your neighbours' records arriving, because that part of the radio runs far louder than the part that earns.
- Do not run the wallet off a long cable from your computer. Measured: it cost about half the answers, and half the answers is the difference between earning and not. A plain wall plug.
- Stop moving it. Every move restarts the measurement. The most common way to earn nothing is to keep checking.
And the card
Here is where it honestly stands, which is better than a promise.
There is no image to write to a card yet. The one that exists is ours, with our keys on it, and you cannot have that one for the same reason you would not want it.
It lands on 12 December, and the reason it is not out already is worth knowing, because it is also the reason you can trust what you eventually get. The record format freezes that day. Boards in strangers' hands never get a wire change, so anything published before the freeze would put boxes into the world that can never be corrected. We would rather be late than send you something we have to apologise for.
Listen near me and we both earn.
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