The largest limitation with a lot of nodes is channel congestion. Despite the name, LongFast is still pretty slow. The more nodes you have the longer channels stay active when a message is sent. Not to mention all the telemetry packets being sent about.

My local area is nowhere near populated enough to cause an issue, but I’ve seen many recommendations that switching to ShortFast is the way to go when you have enough node density. It’s around 10x faster so it can handle more traffic. While range is smaller the higher number of nodes in your area would help offset the drawbacks.

The issue then is you’re no longer on the default setting of all factory meshtastic devices so no one visiting your area would be able to see your mesh. The only way around this I know of is if you’re putting key locations on the mqtt meshmap where it shows your device’s default channel. Or a smaller mesh still running LongFast that periodically broadcasts something like “This area runs ShortFast, come join us!”

Honestly it’s just reluctance on my part. It’s a brand new roof and I was trying to avoid drilling in it. But if I can mount a tripod on the peak it’ll get me an extra 15’ of height on top of whatever pole I use.

I’d love a proper tower. I’m also trying to get back into HAM after a 30-year break but I just don’t have the funds at through moment 😅

Thanks! Definitely going to check them out. Most people here attach antennas to their chimney. Unfortunately the chimney on my house was removed during the last shingle job so I have no mount points left.

That sounds pretty great. I’ll have to look at local options. Biggest issue for me would be if I have a flagpole I’d want to put a flag on it 😆.

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.

If this is for emergency preparation you may as well leave them up permanently. Even if you don’t want them turned on all the time you could set it up to automatically start on battery power when the mains power drops during storms.

Got another contact last night in a plane at 90.1 miles, then got a relay through them to a neighboring state at 347 miles.

That’s true. The biggest thing I’d be worried about is feature creep. If you try to be everything you won’t effectively be anything. I’m glad to see meshtastic is making improvements to routing and DMs in the new version. Hopefully they just continue to refine and not bloat.

Very nice! I like the pager style with clip.

As a high school biology teacher in Louisiana I really feel the pain of that survey. My district spends a lot of time on evolution, but it only goes so far with the kids if their parents are against it.

I’ll second this. My 6 dBi antenna was able to hit a plane, but only because it was also 50 miles away. The cone on a 10 dBi would be too narrow even for that.

Let us know how it turns out. I’m sure they’ll be some signal reduction, but 33cm wavelengths will still be able to escape.

I think it’s still a valid question if you frame it along the lines of “something useful at protests, but also in everyday peaceful life”.

Meshtastic LoRa is worth looking into if you’re going to protests with friends/family/cohorts. You can get a waterproof, GPS enabled, credit-card sized module with multi-day battery life and no flashing required for $35 (T1000-E). That’s specifically because it can also be used when hiking, going to festivals, or just for fun.

I was just at a Mardi Gras parade and text messages couldn’t go through due to network congestion from too many people. With a couple of meshtastic devices our phones could still text each other and see our GPS positions on a map. All with encryption enabled.

Love the idea so much that I tried it. Turns out a url for a babel page is around 2,000 bytes :-(

Same old story of a community-driven site resorting to ads for revenue. After feedback they started a subscription-based version called totalFark that didn’t have ads. Then they introduced ads on totalFark as well, but didn’t vet their advertisers. So some of the banner ads were running malicious code on users browsers.

Love the idea! Kinda like fark.com before they got all shitty.

No worries! If you’re starting out you can’t go wrong with a T1000-E. It’s water resistant, has GPS built-in, and ties everything together in a neat package for ~$35. There are plenty of other nodes out there but it’s more of a build your own kit situation. If you’re into microcontroller programming and stuff like arduino/RP/etc then Heltec v3 Lora boards are good tinker hardware.

We also have a community here on mander for meshtastic.

Yes! If you leave the default channel enabled it will join the public meshtastic network. But you can run eight channels at once, and the others can have different encryption keys.

The default setting is also to forward any received packets to the mesh, even ones it can’t decrypt.

For a good compromise, use Meshtastic. Long-range radio mesh network for texting that phones can use instead of cell networks.

Ah, interesting. I have USB hardwire kits for my dashcam but they’re not on a timer. I’ve seen the T-Echo, definitely something I’ll be purchasing in the future. I’m carrying a T-1000E right now.