So, I’m scratching my head, and hoping someone here can help, or have had a similar experience?
I live at 500msl in a small rural town of about 300 people. Started experimenting about a month ago and have a few T1000-E’s and a station g2. The waterproof enclosure I ordered for the g2 finally arrived a few days ago and it’s now up on a modest pole attached to my house (about 4m high), signal is much better and we only have 3 regular members of our mesh at this stage (still testing before advertising to locals).
Even before raising the g2, we’d had a few times when a couple of nodes would appear for a few hours in the early hours of the morning. We are in an area popular with hiking and 4wders so this isn’t particularly unlikely especially as these are given as ideal use cases for Meshtastic, and sometimes people do get up early for this kind of thing!
But last night, we had an absolute explosion of nodes in the early hours. All had gps locations of around a very specific area on the coast, approximately 180km away as the crow flies. I think one or two of them had been seen before but I’d wiped my nodeDB a few times since then so not completely sure.
The similarity to previous times when we saw a few nodes in early hours, but many more (with g2 higher, makes sense regardless of how), makes me wonder now if something atmospheric is happening.
Could this be tropospheric ducting? If so has anyone managed to actually communicate with this kind of connection over MT?
This is just a hypothetical, but have you compared the SNR of your local nodes throughout the day? It could be that your local noise floor gets lower at certain times and allows you pick up further signals.
I’ve seen similar results where I get nodes from a town about 100 km away, but only around 8 PM. My local nodes SNR around that time is ~4 dBi higher than normal.
That is an excellent question! I have noticed it can change, and have been paying more attention to those numbers since raising the station g2, but this is a really oddly specific collection of nodes, all from one place. Maybe I should post a pic…