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?
Is it possible that one of the devices has been connected to the Internet and those new nodes you see come from MQTT? You can disable that option if that’s the case.
I’m not sure, there’s lots of nodes closer, I would have thought if there was an MQTT connection that would see them first not a specific location further away? 🤔