Three Meshtastic nodes are active in Cape Town for off-grid communications during disasters or just to meet your neighbours
Myself and two other ham radio operators have established 3 Meshtastic nodes that will operate 24/7 to help build out more connectivity across Cape Town.
We are using license-free 868 MHz radios, so anyone can buy these cheap (ish) devices and ge ...continues
So I took my newly bought #meshtastic device to the nearby highest hill overlooking the whole city of Poznań and... nothing. No one else was on the network. That is disappointing to say the least.
I think I'll try now with a slightly larger antenna, and then I'll go to the city and try again.
I'm writing about Meshtastic, a decentralised, peer to peer communication network that uses LoRa radios.
My initial experiences with it are not that positive, but I learnt a lot along the way, and thought it would be useful to share with the world what I found out so far.
There's a bit about frequencies, antennas and all that hamradio stuff.
My new #Meshtastic record — 49 km 😲 From hills around Wells to Cardiff. In general, this area is very busy with Meshtastic nodes so great opportunity to have a casual chat with radio geeks!
i've ordered a handful of RAK4630 nRF52 microcontroller w/SX1262 LoRa PHY modules for evaluation. i wish to make a power-sipping handheld #meshtastic device that may contain the DNA of the Pocket CHIP's design language. it seems right
Today I tried to find some nodes in a big city. I wanted to do a longer walk, but freezing rain came so I ended my search much too soon. No nodes reported :( need to try again, do a longer walk and get somewhere high, maybe one day I will finally find a friendly node #meshtastic
My area is really sparse when it comes to meshtastic coverage and I would like to expand it. There are a lot of videos on how to build solar powered stations, but nothing I could find on how you should go about setting the nodes up.
How do I set up a solar based station in areas that I don't own? I'm looking for some sort of game plan on how to go about setting up a meshtastic network. I want to expand in my area, but don't know the best way to go about it.
LilyGo T-Echo license-free radio arrived today. Love that it has a screen to see range and direction to nearby radios, as well as incoming text messages. Can't wait to go walk in the forest and test out whether I can connect to any other #Meshtastic radios across #CapeTown and surrounds.
More #Meshtastic testing on Brzanka, Poland. These small 2 dBi antennas work pretty well 600-800 m with nearly line of sight, but inside forest leaves block a lot of signal. With one relay (placed somewhere in the forest on the hill) I get a link to another node placed behind the hill, around 2 km in total.
Wow just got my first ever message from a stranger on the “public” #Meshtastic channel. Comes out they’re 38 km away with a rather poor antenna! My previous record was 30 km on the coast.
I've been casually playing with Meshtastic to get an understanding of how LoRa works in practice and managed to get a signal between my house and my office 3.5km away. Granted I'm pretty high up in a tall office building, but I was genuinely surprised and impressed!
Each time I do some experiments with #LoRa I’m stunned by human ingenuity which led to invention of these protocols. A small radio powered by a 18650 provided a reliable two-way communications over ~30 km.
On both ends I was using #Meshtastic node built on WisBlock Meshtastic Starter Kit. What makes a huge difference in comparison to my past experiments is the antenna: On the tiny PCB antenna that comes with the WisBlock kit you can get at best ~200 m in mixed urban terrain, but in most cases it will be less than that.
Merely adding RAK 3 dBi and 5 dBi fiberglass antennas made a huge difference: in urban terrain I was easily getting 1-3 km range with no line of sight. But then I used an opportunity of a walk around Swanage to test it even further: I left one node (5 dBi) at Portland Bird Observatory and took the smaller 3 dBi node with myself for the walk. Right after leaving from Swanage I didn’t get any packets through. I was a bit disappointed, but it came out it’s because the start was well hidden behind a hill. Once I got on top of the cliffs, messages started to come through reliably well under 1 second on the default FAST_LONG radio setting (SF11). Note that Meshtastic doesn’t merely send and forget, it sends a packet and expects an acknowledgement, so you need to actually have a reliable two-way link for it to show packets properly sent.
The measured distance at the most remote reception point was ~30 km. If I wasn’t shy and asked the manager of the Portland lighthouse for access to the top, it would be very likely much further.
The long-distance link won’t work in crevasses, but here comes Meshtastic with its peer-to-peer routing. You don’t need line of sight as long as there’s some node above you that will route your message to the remote link. And because a RAK node can easily recharge battery from a small PV panel placed inside the enclosure (!), a router node could be feasibly placed on a tall tree and largely forgotten.
LoRa has low bandwidth, so it’s mostly suitable for sending relatively short text messages which is not very attractive at the time of 5G. At the same time I find it very interesting to research and test such communication methods, as situations when you don’t have that 5G or even 2G are entirely feasible with aging electrical and communications infrastructure, especially with extreme weather conditions becoming more and more frequent…
Discourse ( https://discourse.org/ ) is pretty terrific. I wish more people used it for support etc instead of Discord. #meshtastic uses both, which is okay, but I worry about things happening in the Discord that aren't searchable or whatnot.
So I ordered a second #meshtastic device, this time for 868MHz. According to https://meshmap.net/ there are some 868 nodes not that far away, so I should be able to achieve at least some contact. And I will leave my 434MHz version for later, maybe one day I will find somebody using that frequency.
#Solar panel with USB A connector is plugged into the #lilygo#tbeam USB micro power in port. The tbeam has a 16850 3400 mAh Li-Ion 3.7 V battery. The panel & tbeam are behind a velux roof window angled at the sky. The sun is shining well today, no clouds. The t-beam shows 4.2 V plugged in symbol in the #meshtastic app. When unplugged from the panel, the t-beam shows 100% charge.
solar panel https://www.botnroll.com/en/solar-panels/3244-monocrystalline-solar-panel-5v-1a.html
This is test to see how long this lasts - there is no power management circuit.