I am experimenting a bit with Lora and Meshtastic mesh networking. I wanted to see how it could track me as I did a prone paddle out in the sound. Since I am only a few inches from the water, and the node I was carrying didn't have its antenna vertical, transmitting probably wasn't ideal. But at only 60mW, this aint bad. Looking at the first pic, the red dots with the diamond in them are the beacons. The cluster is home base. The one the furthest north is about a mile from home base. I did paddle well around Brooks Point this morning, so I wasn't getting received all the way home. I just need to find a friend in Brigands Bay who would be willing to put a node out on their deck to add to the mesh 😉

I used a T-Beam lora transceiver on my paddleboard (with the factory crappy antenna). At home base, I have a similar device with a high gain antenna outside. I then have a Raspberry Pi with a Lora tranceiver on it in the house that is part of the mesh. It takes data and then pushes it to an MQTT server that is on the same Raspberry Pi. I have another pi running node-red that listens to the MQTT server and bridges the data over to my ThingsBoard server that has a Postgres database. I queried the DB for the specific node and mapped on Google Maps. Lots of steps, but something easily automated with a little code.

#meshtastic #meshnetwork #hamradio #radio