Reply To: Current, best-supported cellular XBee radio for MayFly

In our live installations, we still have the 2G Bees. That being said, what do you mean by “supported?” The Mayfly should work very with any of the digi cellular Xbees. You do need the sol

In our live installations, we still have the 2G Bees. That being said, what do you mean by “supported?” The Mayfly should work very with any of the digi cellular Xbees. You do need the solder jumper to get enough power for the 3G and cat 1 bees. The cat m might be able to go without it, but I haven’t tested enough. As far as library and code to communicate with the network through the Bees, TinyGSM (which I maintain a fork of) supports the digi bees. I’ve wrapped TinyGSM into the giant Modular sensors library and think it works rather nicely.

The problem we’re having with using the digi XBee’s is the communication with the Hologram.io cellular provider we’ve been using. For reasons not yet understood by me, I have not been at all successful in getting the LTE (cat 1 or m) to be allowed registration with a hologram sim. I have heard from both digi and hologram that they know of customers using them together, but I haven’t had any success. I had no problem registering and using the 3G XBee with a hologram sim or the LTE XBee’s with an AT&T sim.

So, if you’re not using hologram’s network, I’d go with the digi LTE-M xbee. It’s carrier certified, not horrifically expensive and it readily available.

If you are using hologram and can do one solder jumper, get the digi 3G xbee.

If you want hologram and don’t mind buying from the Netherlands or can’t solder, I’ve tested the Sodaq uBee with the U201 and it works nicely. The other versions of the uBee might work, but they aren’t carrier certified and I really don’t know if they’d be accepted into the network. They assist won’t fit in the boxes we like to use.

The Mayfly does not implement enough on in the xcee footprint to use any purge cellular xb I’ve found.

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