Advancing your Hotspotty tool usage
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Newest edition to the Hotspotty toolset “Line of Site”
Line-of-sight propagation is a characteristic of electromagnetic radiation or acoustic wave propagation which means waves travel in a direct path from the source to the receiver. Electromagnetic transmission includes light emissions traveling in a straight line. The rays or waves may be diffracted, refracted, reflected, or absorbed by the atmosphere and obstructions with material and generally cannot travel over the horizon or behind obstacles.
Enough with the explanations let’s get to my favorite way of learning, hands on experience.
- Two ways to get started with this tool, you can select a previously saved location from your workspace or you can drop a new pin altogether creating a new location in your workspace. Searching the lat/long is also an option as I did in the picture above.
- Now that we have our location select the vertical ellipsis/hamburger icon I have circled at the lower right.
3. Select the Line of sight tool to bring up the UI, this will load an end point where you want to test the ability of another hotspot. This endpoint can be placed directly on top of another hotspot. These are considered Point A and Point B.
The page will look something like this (below) without my additions of text and circles.
4. As you see the endpoint (Point B) ended up in the middle of the river. Now let’s move that endpoint on top of a hotspot in the area and see what kind of connection we might be able to receive. This can be done by click and dragging to drop the endpoints final location.
5. Select Confirm once you have your selected your endpoint location. Now a viewable graph will show how your connection might be successful (green line) or not likely (red line). This is done by scrolling down on the menu/UI below the map area. Hover your mouse over the Line of sight section and scroll down so you don’t just scroll on the map itself. I forget to do this all the time, so I felt the reminder was necessary.
A ridiculous example, but it helps showcase the power of this tool. Most deployments are not 100m high on the Statue of Liberty. Editing Point A and Point B’s height is easily done by typing in a new height or using the up down notches once you hover over the height areas. Let’s put both the mock hotspot positions to only 5m in height each and see what happens.
This is all based on topography, so buildings are not taken into account at the moment. Clearly the line shows the potential for a bad connection or a lack thereof because of an obstruction. This helps take a lot of guesswork out of future deployments and current, which goes hand in hand with proper hexagon resolution placement.
If you enjoyed adding this to your Hotspotty tool belt consider supporting them through any of the various links they have via their Hotspot Makers Page found here at the top left next to your Workspace tab.
Helium Deploy (Trusted Reseller) is an option listed as well, or you can select the regular Maker purchase links through the icons ex: Bobcat, RAK, SenseCAP. Which will bring up a page that looks like this. These are all the official links to use for each of the hotspot makers, the same purchase links can be found from helium.com/mine as well.
Thank you for reading and using Hotspotty. Check out the Hotspotty YouTube channel and their current video on this Line of sight tool. Feel free to check out my YouTube channel as well with more Hotspotty tutorials soon to come.
Hotspotty links are attached with my affiliate link. I may receive compensation for you creating a verified account with my link, and I appreciate the support greatly.
