FEELING QUITE MESHY TODAY!
BULLISH ON #MESHTASTIC DEVICES! HAVEN’T FOUND A FELLOW NODE YET BUT HOPEFUL FOR THE FUTURE. 💪📡📶
Discussion
Does yours have LoRa? Which center freq. ?
Yes on LoRa and I tried long fast and medium fast so far. Played with it for the first time last night so still trying things out. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
If you go on a plane with it, make sure to set it into client mute mode. That way you are not connecting people on the ground from hundreds of miles away that won't be able to see each other once your flight leaves the area.
My general rule of thumb is that if your node is less than 20 feet above the ground, you should be using client mute. If it is between 20 and 100 feet above the ground, you should be using client. And if it is 100 or more feet above the ground, you can likely use router mode.
Thanks. I appreciate the feed back.
Wow! Serious Blackberry vibes.
Big time blackberry vibes! Takes me back
Can you point me to link that has more on this project? I feel an oncoming rabbit hole urge…
Buy one for a fren.
It’s lonely in these parts. Frens are 30+ miles out in other towns.
This is great! Thank you for sharing!
I finally saw my first message yesterday but was unable to get my message to send. Must have been too far away. I open up the map inside the app and there’s not a single node on there.
When I open up the map on mine, it says there is no map tile data. So I will have to look into this. Someone shared a link with me that is pretty cool. I found someone about 10 miles away from where I work out of so I may try to message them during the day once in a while if possible.
https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/?lat=32.01657700731204&lng=269.60276519520636&zoom=3
This map shows a couple a few miles from me. The map inside the meshtastic app shows nobody in the whole world. I’m new to this.
I’m new to it as well. That’s why it was nice Somebody shared this map with me. Gonna test it out after an hour or so and see if I can get the closest person to me to respond. Looks like it’s about 10 miles away.
I just linked back up to my node today and instead of the normal 4 nodes there has been lately, there are 90 now. I’m still unable to send but I see others chatting. I did nothing to my settings or anything. This is all confusing. I’ll just keep shouting into the void and maybe it will go through to someone someday.
Hey at least your seeing some action. That’s really good. Keep trying and see what happens. Are you messages being sent to the public? I just ask because there is a private option and they won’t see those if that’s the case.
I tried sending some messages and also scanning near the 1 on the map by me but no luck. I also scanned around me during the workday but couldn’t find any new nodes. I just gotta be patient and keep trying I guess.
Best of luck to you.
Yes, primary channel 0 public. All my attempts say “max retransmission reached”. I’m assuming that no one is receiving when I broadcast. Not sure if it’s hardware,software or user error lol. I may try a different antenna but that’s another rabbit hole.
Quoted to see who can help you with this. I’m to new to the mesh stuff to be of any help. lol
It's likely you are not being heard, because otherwise you would get a cloud with a checkmark. What device are you running, and have you tried taking it outside?
RAK Wisblock 4631, I haven’t experimented with it much besides turning it on and trying it occasionally from home. The first few times there was a couple nodes that showed up on my node list in the app. As of yesterday there is now 90 listed nodes in the app. Seems strange all of a sudden to see so many more. I saw some chatting so I tried to join but no luck.
I took it camping with a friend last weekend who also has a device. We were able to chat across the table but when he took his on a drive we had no luck. I’m not sure what a typical range is or how much a different antenna would help?
Typical range between devices is about a mile if they're both on the ground or very near it. If there's a router up on a tower, your device can be significantly farther away from it.
Here in my area, for example, before our router died about a week ago, it was 200 feet up on a tower, and another person with a node had their solar node up 30 feet on a flagpole, and they were 17 miles apart and able to communicate.
Wow, that’s impressive range. My ultimate goal is to figure this thing out and implement something for my hunting camp communications using strategically placed routers for coverage.
Any recommendations on a good video series to learn more, so I don’t spam you with a million questions?
Not really. Firstly though do NOT use router or repeater mode unless your node is 100 feet above ground or higher. Clients rebroadcast transmissions too but only after routers and if needed.
Why the 100’ rule?
So the routing algorithm works like this. There's something called the contention window. And the very first part is for routers and repeaters. And they will always broadcast anything they hear no matter what.
The second part of the contention window is reserved for clients to rebroadcast any transmission that they only heard one time and the farthest away node by signal strength is the one that rebroadcasts it.
The third part of the contention window is used by what are called router late nodes, which are meant to fill in coverage gaps. They will always rebroadcast whatever they hear, but they will only do so after all routers have already broadcasted, and after all clients have already broadcasted, if needed.
By using router mode at low elevation you cause something called hop gobbling where the router will broadcast the message and not end up letting it broadcast to a node that would be better positioned to broadcast it farther.
100 feet isn't a hard and fast rule, but it's a good general idea because the higher the node is, the better it would work as a router.
A node that is, say, 50 feet on a tower on top of a mountain would be a great router, even though it's only 50 feet above the ground. It's way above the valleys around the mountain, so it would work fine.
If you live in a flat land, the absolute highest towers would be the best place for routers.
Generally, if you have access to such a high spot, you will probably want to coordinate with other local mesh users in order to optimize the placement of your nodes.
Also, since routers broadcast as soon as they hear a message, a badly placed router can actually decrease the distance a message can travel across the mesh and therefore hurts everybody.
Super informative. Thank you for the explanation. 👍
Glad I can help. I firmly believe in decentralization and meshtastic is doing a great job at starting to decentralize communications, so I would want to do my absolute best to promote it and help it grow properly. Like, sure, right now we are only using it to send text messages over long distances, but as the density of nodes increases, you can up the bandwidth and shorten the links, and you could easily start to send data over these links like files and audio and possibly even video, depending on the compression algorithms and link speeds.
I see the possibilities as the network grows and agree that decentralization is key. Are there any resources that you’d recommend to help me figure out the scenario that I’m trying to accomplish?
I was planning on a repeater that’s waterproof and solar but now youve got me second guessing and realizing that I need more knowledge. I don’t want to do something that could make communications worse.
Thanks again.
I've learned what I know through just asking questions of the community, just like you have been, and watching all the YouTube videos I can get my hands on about meshtastic.
You might also run into another system called meshcore, and it's very similar to meshtastic, but at least I won't touch it, because it's not fully open source. The firmware for the devices is open source, but the application that you install on your phone to interact with it is not open source, and therefore I will not touch it.
Right on, it’s been nice chatting. I’m sure I’ll see you around the halls of nostr. Meshtastic bedtime videos last night for me. Thanks for the fyi on meshcore, one less rabbit hole.
Wow, this goes way deeper than I thought. Thanks for that info. So being on the outskirts of a city that’s fairly flat, I probably shouldn’t use a repeater?
What would you think about a scenario with an off grid location with no one around but me and my homies wanting to communicate? We have a hill approximately 1 mile to the top (very steep) from our cabin. We use the area between the cabin and the top of the hill. We also venture to the river below directly opposite the hill from our cabin. Would a repeater be best at the top of this hill instead of at our cabin? Or all client nodes?
Thank you for your input. I wish you had a wallet setup to ϟ for this invaluable V4V.
🤙
I would put a client on the top of that hill that's solar powered. That way you can communicate with the cabin and with the river on the other side of the hill. You can set it to be an unmessageable node so that nobody tries to contact it directly.
The difference between a router and a repeater is that a router shows up in the list of nodes that exist, whereas a repeater does not. So it's probably better to use router instead of repeater on a normal basis.
The only way I would suggest using router mode is if that hill is the absolute highest point around for quite a long distance.
Even then though, I would suggest using client mode at first, and if there's anybody else in the area who has meshtastic coordinate with them to see if a router would make sense at the top of that hill.