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A little more experimenting with my outdoor Meshtastic node. I realised that trying to mount it anywhere accessible on the house wasn’t going to get above trees and other houses so trying it on a telescopic 4.5 metre mast with a short coax run to the antenna. It seems to work ok although I need to get a better mounting bracket rather than using cable ties. I still can’t see any other nodes from my home though apart from my own.. I need to do some range testing with my own nodes to see if I am actually getting better reach with this set up.

#meshtastic

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Discussion

Ava 1y ago

Awesome 🚀

Kman 1y ago

Nice setup. The antenna coax connection should run in to the housing from the bottom. Having it come in from the top will allow water to eventually get in regardless of how waterproof you try and make it. Gravity always wins.

phil 1y ago

Thanks, yeah that makes sense. Currently it is just temporary for testing so I’ll change that around when I figure out how I mount this more permanently.

ulrichard 1y ago

I often have a t-deck with me when I drive around with the car. It is always interesting to see where some noes are located. But interestingly the most nodes I see when skiing on the mountain tops.

phil 1y ago

I see a few nodes around when I’m in the 19th floor office in the CBD and from messages with the operators of those nodes I know roughly where some others are located but I think I’m still going to struggle to reach any of them from home. I should start talking one with me when I’m driving around just to see what else I can find.

ulrichard 1y ago

If you can install a router node in your 19th floor office, and connect it to your home node, that should give you some nice coverage. I have routing nodes at home, in the office and at my parents. Two have line of sight and give decent coverage in the area. The third has some mountains in between. After deploying some solar nodes on mountain tops, I should be able to connect them.

phil 1y ago

There is a tower that I may be able to put a node on. I know I have line of sight to that tower from my house as I have a fixed wireless Internet service that goes to it. I sort of have permission to put it on there but need to figure out exactly what hardware to use and who is going to climb the tower to install.. From that tower I suspect I may already be able to reach some other nodes.

I’m also thinking of putting one at my mum’s house. She is on the side of a hill with a good view of much of the city.

ulrichard 1y ago

Cool! I wonder how scalable meshtastic is. I think once there are as many meshtastic nodes as cellphones, the current architecture would no longer work. But until then, it's a lot of fun.

phil 1y ago

Yeah I’ve been wondering about the scalability too but where I am in Australia we are a long way off of needing to worry about that. I did discover yesterday that a couple of the other nodes that I’ve been finding have actually been installed by a guy I know through work. Hopefully I can coordinate with him to find locations to install nodes to get better coverage.

hueso 1y ago

Signal loss is introduced at every inch of cable from the antenna. Try to keep it short, raise the box.

LL62 1y ago

This looks hardcore 📡🤠🤙