I’d like to have one at two physical locations, best I can do is a window and a third on me to actually message from. Hope to get sensor data from the two stations and have all three in client mode.
Is that good, bad, whatever!?
What are you doing these days in your local area?
Have a T-Beam Supreme mounted near a window that I connect to a couple times a week and a SenseCap T1000-e that I have on my backpack. I travel for work 90% of my life, and the t1000 is great. Seems like I have to reboot the tbeam after a few days or I can no longer connect to it.
Kind of interested in the BBS setup for nodes. Need some downtime from work to dig in. Ran a dial-up bbs a lifetime ago and really enjoyed it.
I too am interested in a BBS
New to it, so idk what I’m doing and it is subject to change daily, but so far I have 3 nodes.
T1000e in pocket, client mute.
T114v2 in bag or placed in a high window near by, bigger antenna and better range on it but the t1000e is just so perfect for a pocket. This one is client.
Heltec v3, not too happy with it. No GPS and like 8hr batt because of the ESP32. And on top of that every time it dies it resets itself. I think I may just keep that one plugged in 24/7 next to a window and connect it to MQTT when I have internet again, and keep the battery in as a backup for power loss, idk. Client as well.
Kiiiiinda wanna solar power a RAK and throw it on the roof, but “one day.”
My area has a router like 200 feet up a tower about three and a half miles away from me and so most people are in client or client mute mode and just use the router as their hop. Having them all in client mode is fine, unless you guys get a router yourselves, and then you’ll probably want to use client mute instead, especially for the one you have on you, since it won’t be very high up and won’t contribute much to extending the mesh. It seems to me that anything more than 100 feet up above the ground should be a router. Anything between 20 feet and 100 feet up on like a flagpole or something like that should be a client and anything less than 20 feet up should be in client mute.
Im just getting into all this. If i put up a router on a tower, realistically how much traffic can it handle? And how stable is it? If ive got to climb once a week to reset it… thats a bit of a turn off. Like i said, im brand new. But i have location, expendable funds, and curiosity.
Well, you can get two nodes, one of which would be a router, and then one you can have in client mute mode, and you can set the router to be administered remotely by your node in client mute mode, which would make most configurations able to be done remotely. It might still be best to climb the tower to update it, say once or twice per year, just to keep the firmware up to date with all the newest functionality, though. I’m honestly not exactly sure how much traffic it can handle. I know that in my area we only have about 10 total nodes and it handles that just fine as well as quite a few nodes sometimes when we get band openings. I would say just best guess at least 40 or 50 with no problem before you need to move to a faster mode such as MediumSlow. I have heard ShortFast can handle several hundred clients with no problem and most areas would have no need for that unless you’re at an event of some sort.
Edit: I am rather new to it myself only having had mine for about a month now. From what I have heard, you want to keep your channel utilization under 30%. It’s fine if it goes over it sometimes during busy moments, but if it starts approaching 30% on average over like a week or something like that, it might be time to move to a faster mode, such as MediumSlow. Our channel utilization with 10 nodes only seems to be about 5% on average, which makes me think it can handle quite a few more. Our router here reports its data twice per day so I just added all 14 channel utilization numbers up and then divided by 14 in order to get the average over the week.
Edit 2: If there is already a router in your area that’s higher than the one you propose, then yours should not be in router mode. It should be in client mode because the other router is higher.
Thanks for the quick response.
Im happy that uptime seems to be as good as you say, and not having to worry about excessive traffic for the future is nice.
I will have highest access point for my area from my grain bin elevator and it looks so far like im alone in this experiment here. I can also get access to another high location or two. Its definitely enough to “paint the town” so to speak. Nothing else even remotely close in the area according to meshmap.net so ive got a nice sandbox to play with all by my lonesome. Small town perks i guess.
Ill do some small scale playing around before i start climbing or aquiring more hardware, but this looks like fun. When i am satisfied on doing low elevation tests, ill definitely be interested in best hardware for a router, but i can take this step by step for now and be happy with learning. It helps that this all seems, at least at first glance, to be fairly straight forward so far as hardware requirements.
oh then by all means please do I think you will very much enjoy it. Mesh map is definitely a good starting point, but it’s not entirely believable. For example, it says we have two nodes in my area on Mesh map, and yet I know for a fact that we have at least ten that occasionally pop up, most of which do not offer their location and therefore are not on Mesh map. There are two decently large cities of over 100,000 people, 70 miles away in opposite directions from me, and one of them says it has five nodes, and the other says it has three nodes. And I’m almost certain there’s more than that. So MeshMap is a good start point but not totally reliable.
Just started playing around with MT a couple weeks ago. Currently have 11 nodes provisioned and ready to do…something with.
So far, I’ve just been playing around with things to learn: figuring out channel settings, deciding on whether to run my private channel in a custom frequency slot or override it to use the “default” frequency slot so it can relay for nodes outside my own mesh. Things like that. Have also been 3D printing various cases for them.
Original plan is/was to have 5 of them configured as portable nodes for when my friends and I go camping, backpacking, hiking, hunting, etc. Kind of a modern text-based version of the FRS walkie-talkies we used to carry (with position reporting as a bonus). Probably going to reserve a few nodes for that purpose and maybe a couple more with bigger antennas that can be temporarily dropped to act as relays (and pick them back up on our way out).
There’s not currently any near me, but I am also looking to start a local Meshtastic group. My backyard has a hill where I can mount a node, and the relative elevation is pretty optimal for it. According to the site planner, I should have pretty good coverage mounting it there (with a solar panel).
I haven’t decided if I want to link the community group nodes via MQTT or try to build it out natively. Maybe I can start with MQTT and hope that it fills in later?
I’m new to meshtastic too. Just an FYI, you can make the primary channel a custom private one and still have a longfast pubic channel as a secondary as long as you you set the Lora frequency to 20 (at least that’s the default one in the USA).
