All working now, thanks Chrille!!
For anyone else trying to get RFM69W working with ESP8266
I have
MISO -> GPIO12
MOSI -> GPIO13
SCK -> GPIO14
NSS - > GPIO16
DIO0 ->GPIO15 (Which is also pulled down with a 10k resistor)
ANA -> antenna (to be honest i eyeballed 9cm but haven't measured it (was going to trim afterwards))
VCC -> 3.3V
GND -> GND
I also soldered a 4.7uf cap over the power and ground of the RFM69W directly on the RFM69W PCB
For the power supply i have a 5V USB supply (old phone charger) with a 1000uf cap over the +ve and -ve. then and LD1117 to feed 3.3V to the ESP and the RFM69. Should probably also have 47uf cap somewhere on the 3.3V side as well.
I saw people talking about them being too close as well. I tested most of mine about 50cm apart with no major issues.
I made the following mods to get either the gateway or node sketch working
#define MY_RF69_IRQ_PIN 15
#define MY_RF69_SPI_CS 16
All makes for a pretty cheap gateway. I was planning on using the ESP for nodes as well but is seems its power consumption is far greater than the arduino mini pro, so i ordered a few of them for nothing and will build my nodes based on those.
