Having read in 2023 that some of the UK Summits On The Air fraternity were experimenting with low-power "Internet of Things" hardware to operate APRS on 70cm, I decided to give it a try for myself. As this map shows, the adoption of this system has been very patchy in the UK, compared with mainland Europe:
I was already familiar with LoRa hardware, as used by the UK High Altitude Society to track their balloon experiments up to the stratosphere and back on 434MHz, so I had a spare TTGO board which I could program as a temporary receive IGate (G6GVI-10). Thus I only needed a buy a TTGO T-Beam unit to program as my G6GVI-11 portable tracker.
The T-Beam is a compact board which includes GNSS navigation, LoRa radio, an OLED display and even has a battery holder for an 18650 Lithium-ion battery on the back. I put the unit into a small plastic case (which I can fasten onto the shoulder-strap of my rucsack) and fitted a flexible quarter-wave antenna.
One of my first tests was a walk around the local park, which gave excellent coverage with 100mW on 439MHz.
But when I took the unit up onto the local moors (Winter Hill), I was delighted to find that its range extended tens of miles down to well-sited IGates in Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Welshpool, and even Powys!
Now I take this little tracker with me whenever I go up on the hills, so that the stations with whom I'm talking on 23cm or 4m can see whereabouts I am on the hill.
More local IGate receivers came on-line in the first few weeks of 2024:
Then I found a project from Austria which provided a simple conversion of one of my existing LoRa receivers into an APRS IGate, with which I could fill in the local coverage on my way up to the moors, from where the more distant stations can track me:
