💡 Tips

Little things that make a big difference. Learned the hard way, so you don't have to.

Kelly in general

💾 Save your set-up before every update

Admin › Save config keeps your callsign, contacts and settings in one file. After updating, press Ctrl+F5 once; if anything's missing, Admin › Load config.

🎮 Not sure what a button does? Try it in the demo

Add ?demo to Kelly's address (or use Try the demo). Everything is pretend, so you can press anything.

🔒 Keep your Kelly address to yourself

The token= on the end of your Pi's address is what stops anyone else on your network keying your radio. Bookmark it; don't post it.

📱 Kelly on your phone

On the Pi, kellypage-qr shows your Kelly address as a QR code. Scan it with the phone's camera.

🏠 Hide your exact house on the map

When you set Kelly's fixed position, pick a lower precision (about 1 km) and you'll show as "near" your place on aprs.fi instead of on your roof.

LoRa mesh

📛 Put your callsign in your node's name

For example VK4ABC Home. iGates only gate nodes whose name carries a VK or ZL callsign as the first or second word, and other hams can see who you are.

🤝 MeshCore needs both sides

Messages, pings and traces only work when both nodes have each other as contacts. Kelly's 📇 Ham Contacts tab swaps cards for you.

🌊 Go easy on floods

Flood adverts fill the whole shared mesh. Keep them rare and use zero-hop adverts for "I'm here". In SEQ, follow the MBUG settings (923.125 MHz, 62.5 kHz, SF8, CR5, 2-byte path hashes); Kelly warns if your hash size is wrong.

🔭 Trace before you blame the repeater

A message that "never arrives" is often a stale route. 🔭 Trace Route shows each hop and its signal, and Kelly tries again by flood when a stored route stops answering.

APRS iGate and Mesh Buddy

🧪 Dry run first

Leave the iGate on Dry run and watch the log: it shows exactly what would go to aprs.fi. Go LIVE when it looks right.

📍 Add a tracker the easy way

Switch it on next to your home node and it pops up in 🔎 Add my device. Press This is mine.

📶 The antenna is everything

Mount the tracker's LoRa antenna upright and as high as you can, away from your body. On the first test ride, nearly every lost packet was lost on the very first hop.

🎯 Watch Echo% on a regular route

Mesh Buddy's Echo% graph on aprs.fi shows how often the nearest repeater heard you. Low spots on your route are where a better antenna or a new repeater would help most.

🛑 Never transmit without an antenna

Connect the LoRa antenna before the battery, every time. Transmitting into nothing can damage the radio.