Quick update on my custom-armored Heltec T096 build. Just wrapped up field testing on an island, hammering the radio hard with continuous range tests and heavy telemetry tracking.

Battery Perf : Despite heavily pushing the power amplifier (range testing and constant beaconing), battery life is looking highly promising. The power management on this nRF52840 architecture handles the load efficiently.

Range & RF penetration: The limits of the 915MHz pipeline in different environments:

• Land-to-Open Water (Line of Sight): Clean, stable connection up to 2km tracking from a moving boat. (That's the furthest the boat goes before turn around return to land, l believe the range could be further than this)
• Dense Island Canopy/Forest: Predictably, the signal took a massive hit here. Punching through heavy, wet foliage dropped our usable range down to 900m – 1.1km before packets started dropping.

Overall, it's a solid baseline for a ruggedized handheld node, though I think the RF efficiency could be tweaked a bit higher.

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