Unable to get reception

Troubleshooting
1

Hi, new to using the blues notecard.
I’ve just bought a one of the RAK blues notecards kits and I’ve managed to connect the notecard to the terminal and run commands. I am unable to get any bars of reception despite being in an area with excellent 4g/5g reception from every major carrier in Australia. I’ve gone through every step of the connectivity-troubleshooting multiple times and I just can’t get it to work. Calling the card.wireless request doesn’t give me any values for the sinr, rsrp, etc, and calling the card.time request says “time is not yet set {no-time}” leading me to think that the GPS is also not getting any signal despite being outdoors.
I’m sure this has been posted a million times in this forum but I have searched and found nothing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

2

Hi @Tommisil,

Sorry to hear that you’re having trouble getting started! Can I ask a couple of questions to help point you in the correct direction?

  1. Can you confirm which Notecard you are using in the RAK Blues kit?
  2. Have you connected the antenna to the Notecard (it may help to share a photo of your hardware, for me to assess if there are any issues)

You won’t be able to get a time response for card.time until the Notecard has registered itself on the cellular network.

Thanks,
Alex

3

Hi Alex,
From what I can tell, it’s one of the legacy notecards. Antenna definitely plugged in securely and in the correct frequency range.

Attached a pic:

20250429_074818 (1)
20250429_074818 (1)1920×2560 224 KB

Cheers,
Tommi

4

That all looks correct! Have you recently updated the Notecard? I think that might be a good place to start.

You can update the firmware on the Notecard by heading to the in-browser terminal, connecting the Notecard (RAK board) via USB serial and running firmware install latest.

If this still isn’t working, I think you may need to check that you have Narrowband Cellular coverage at your location. Notecard you are using is the NBGL-500 and will be trying to connect to either NB-IoT or LTE-M networks. While you may have good 4G/5G coverage, this is likely Wideband, which your mobile / cell phone will be using.

I did have a quick search and Google does seem to suggest that Australia has decent Narrowband support, with the likes of Telstra and Optus supporting Narrowband on their networks. Blues does offer other variants of the Notecard including ones that support Wideband if we think this might be the issue!

Thanks,
Alex