In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I’ve heard some people just place “guerilla nodes” to extend coverage.
So, I have rolling hills, but every ideal spot has a cell phone mast, I’m thinking they’d notice. There are some power pylons, I think they’d notice as well. Either one of those would probably be a felony.
None of the buildings are tall enough, it’s US suburbia. I have a drone, i could probably airdrop a small solar node on a roof.
There’s a really large water tower a couple miles away, not LOS, but it would be amazing to help the cause. But again, I don’t think that would go over well and i’m not fond enough of heights to install it.
A tree would be neat, how the heck do you get solar to it though?
I need do some experiments with my drone and see if I can get LOS to somewhere useful. The development I’m in has a hill in the way and no trees. I don’t really want to try to sneak it on my neighbor’s roof.
There’s a 5-story apt building, not to far, but i’m not sure it has RLOS to the school and it has no service areas on top, all tin roofing.
There’s a 3-story hotel that has the right kind of roof layout, but it’s way out of RLOS from me.
If you had convenient trees you pick a pine tree that is bare that hasn’t been outcompeted by other trees. It doesn’t work as well with decidous forests.
There are 4 in my metropolitan area, and I don’t have line of sight to any of them :(
There are about 30 meshtastic in the same area, but most of them are out of range to each other.
I even stood one up at work on the other side of town and mqtt’d them together.
edit: a’ight I put it on a t114. can’t see anything from the house, track practice is 25mi away, lets see if there are any quiet core nodes out there.
edit: edit: Nothing at all. Which is a fing shame, the client is way nicer, it’s better on battery. It’s better on battery on the t114. The map is faster. I think it’s probably a better product since you can kind of emulate the client/router setup and it can work like meshtastic. Maybe I’ll leave my of my v3’s running on it in the attic with a modest antenna upgrade.
So, I setup meshtastic.
Put an antenna on my roof.
Have a decent number of mesh radios. Put one in each car in relay mode.
Setup a locally run LLM and made an interface to it.
Working on setting up a BBS.
I’m in the high density suburbs, I can, when the weather is just right, reach a single node that doesn’t seem to be able to reach any other nodes.
If I go on a drive, I can see 5-10 nodes.
Adoption in the mid-Atlantic US is just so damn low, it’s not really usable.
We need some antennas up high, but there aren’t any reasonable options around me.
In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I’ve heard some people just place “guerilla nodes” to extend coverage.
So, I have rolling hills, but every ideal spot has a cell phone mast, I’m thinking they’d notice. There are some power pylons, I think they’d notice as well. Either one of those would probably be a felony.
None of the buildings are tall enough, it’s US suburbia. I have a drone, i could probably airdrop a small solar node on a roof.
There’s a really large water tower a couple miles away, not LOS, but it would be amazing to help the cause. But again, I don’t think that would go over well and i’m not fond enough of heights to install it.
Tree?
A tree would be neat, how the heck do you get solar to it though?
I need do some experiments with my drone and see if I can get LOS to somewhere useful. The development I’m in has a hill in the way and no trees. I don’t really want to try to sneak it on my neighbor’s roof.
There’s a 5-story apt building, not to far, but i’m not sure it has RLOS to the school and it has no service areas on top, all tin roofing.
There’s a 3-story hotel that has the right kind of roof layout, but it’s way out of RLOS from me.
Could you ask your neighbor?
If you had convenient trees you pick a pine tree that is bare that hasn’t been outcompeted by other trees. It doesn’t work as well with decidous forests.
Ahh damn, yeah, the only pines we get here are hand-planted… good info though, thank you!
Meshcore 😎 you could see if there’s more density of MC around you.
There are 4 in my metropolitan area, and I don’t have line of sight to any of them :(
There are about 30 meshtastic in the same area, but most of them are out of range to each other.
I even stood one up at work on the other side of town and mqtt’d them together.
edit: a’ight I put it on a t114. can’t see anything from the house, track practice is 25mi away, lets see if there are any quiet core nodes out there.
edit: edit: Nothing at all. Which is a fing shame, the client is way nicer, it’s better on battery. It’s better on battery on the t114. The map is faster. I think it’s probably a better product since you can kind of emulate the client/router setup and it can work like meshtastic. Maybe I’ll leave my of my v3’s running on it in the attic with a modest antenna upgrade.