So I was interested in mesh comms years ago. Serval mesh and other wifi meshes were of interest, but never seemed to actually… work.
Then I got a couple of Gotennas. Used them once at a festival and then they went in a box.
Got them out about a year ago and tried to use them, discovered the company who made them decided to stop support for the common plebs who got them kickstarted, and now only do commercial / military apps. Greeeat. Look into HAM radio for the APRS, but hear from a friend that used to do it that in our country it’s a higher level license to do any data, lot of expense and time, and thus there were few people actually doing it, so decide not to go that route. They mention Meshtastic briefly.
Skip forward and see a mention of the T1000-E… yes, I think this is the solution. Buy 4, and then a few days later see mention of the Station G2. Buy one.
They arrive and I get them set up and have a tinker… now it’s time to start telling other people and ask if they can help me test.
I live in a really small rural town of 300 people at 500m on a sortof plateau (small gradients around town) in a mountainous region, couple of hours from a major city. The power fairly regularly goes out, usually from trees dropping power lines in heavy wind, and this is only going to get worse with climate change. Power out means no broadband. If the power is out more than a few hours, no cell connection either (which isn’t great to begin with). So here is a clear use case for local comms in emergencies a few times a year at least.
So I contact two local friends and ask if they would be interested in testing a new radio mesh thing. Unbeknownst to me, BOTH of them actually have experience in HAM / CB radio.
They both are keen to have a play and I give the first a T1000-E a few days back, and with a bit of trial and error, we get a stable connection between our houses that are about 400m apart. This is without even getting antennas on roofs. Then yesterday other friend comes over and I give them a T1000-E and he pops back home - only about 200m to his place. Easy connection, no issues. Other friend is away during the day but I announce on LongFast that we have grown the mesh, but I go to sleep before he gets back.
I wake up this morning to find a smatter of conversation between them after I went to bed, and this is my favourite comment:
“I look at the s/n ratios and think it’s impossible, but it works. Some very clever design and tech.”
😀
So hopefully, we will get more people interested and even potentially a connection to two other towns nearby. Both have significant hills in the way and one is in a twisty windy valley, so we’ll need to get creative or maybe need to set up private mqtt server to relay between key nodes but aware that won’t be useful in emergency situation with no internet/cell data, but we’re learning as we go: I’m happy to have two people on board with more experience than me too.
#meshtastic
Hey, I just thought of something. Does your town have a church that you or your friends attend on a regular basis? Because if so, churches have steeples and steeples would make quite good places for clients or routers depending on their height.
Edit: I would suspect churches in small towns like that would have a very small group of decision makers and something like a node might be proposed as a community service.
Good suggestion but no active churches no, and very small ex-church that I’m aware of in a, non particularly high location. We would need to be getting nodes ideally at the top of hills and there are quite a few!
Okay, if you have a bunch of hills, then yeah, getting a node or several nodes on the tops of those hills would really help a lot.
I am new to it myself, but I’m having somewhat the same experience. I bought the T1000E, and I’ve been running it on a phone backup battery, along with its internal battery for 12 days now, and the phone backup battery is only at 72%. Somebody has decided to make a solar powered node router in this area and put it something like 200 feet up on a tower. So we’ve got pretty good distance around here. But it would still be really cool if somebody was to put another node up somewhere and extend the mesh out farther.
Now, your second friend that lives 200 meters from you. Is that in between your house and your other friend’s house that lives 400 meters away so that you are hopping through them to get to the other person? Or is it on opposite sides where the 400 meter person is hopping through you to get to the 200 meter person?
Also, while long fast is the default, you might get better out of long slow until there are more people in the area that have nodes.
That’s great you have a node high up, I would love to do that here but not sure where it might be practical to do. What kind of tower is the 200 feet one?
I’m in the middle of the 400 and 200 meter people, they are in opposite directions. I was thinking the Station G2 would be good on the roof of the highest house to extend the mesh further but if no one else interested then I was going to do it on mine, which isn’t ideal but would have pretty good reach in one direction, but I’m fairly encouraged with the experiments so far. We get bushwalkers and campers & 4wders up in this area all the time so am expecting to see occasional nodes pop up temporarily if Meshtastic really takes off.
Thanks about the suggestion to try Long Slow, I decided to keep on the default of LongFast at least initially, due to potential for visitors to the region with nodes.
The node on the tower does not belong to me, so I know very little about it besides that it’s about 200 feet up.
Just like with anything radio, height is might. So the higher you can get one of those antennas, the better off you will be.
I can understand why you want to stay on long fast and that makes total sense.
Edit:
Best Practices:
AGL = Above Ground Level
- Router/Repeater >=100ft AGL
- Client 20-100ft AGL
- Client_Mute <20ft AGL or vehicle
That’s very helpful, thankyou! I am still working out the different modes and we’re just leaving everything as client at this point but good to know for when we get busier!
I think you’re really, really going to enjoy it. I know I am.
This is about where I am as well. G2 Base station is ordered, and I have some heltec-V3 clients to play around with. A box of T1000-Es to hand out to the kids will be next. We’re in a Louisiana river delta so the land here is mostly flat, just trees and some <5 story buildings in a city of ~200,000 people. Hopefully we can get some good range with the mesh and grow pretty quickly. I’ve only seen two other nodes so far.
The T1000-E is a truly impressively designed piece of kit. I feel like so much I’ve been into when on bleeding edge is janky or too easy to break, these are solid.
You should look at Reticulum and RNodes. It’s mesh networking over nearly anything including LoRa, with messaging and data. I’m still testing and learning but i setup a community !mander.xyz/c/Reticulum
Keen on Reticulum, but my focus atm is Meshtastic because of the ease of use, both Android and iPhone are dead easy to set up in less than 2 minutes and my use case is for more local nodes in most cases that would be with people with minimal technical skills.
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Honestly in an emergency situation, a walk talky or under 100 CB radio is probably better. But mesh has the “neat” factor of sending text to friends without anything but the devices (well if you dont factor in a frontend like a cell).
Glad to hear you had fun with friends/contacts!
Yes for emergency services radio is probably better, but have had the conversation that those bands get very busy when there is actually an emergency, and unless you’re directly involved in the emergency response it’s better to keep quiet even if you have the devices. To keep everyone else in the loop a mesh would be really helpful and allows for direct comms between people without radio knowledge. I’ve done enough radio stuff at festivals to know it’s a bit daunting for beginners. But these days pretty much everyone, even your grandma, has a cell phone and most understand apps and text messages. So the learning curve is pretty small.
Lilygo t-deck plus. No cell required
