hey all. got three lora mesh nodes up round leeds now, one on the van roof, and the whole reason i ended up on boards again was wanting summat text-only to run over them. 200 odd bytes a message, store and
forward, half the nodelist is called node_7f3a or similar... its basically fido with worse names hehe.
theres a mystery 868 node on a hill over bradford i can hear from the van but i've never worked out whose it is. so if anyone here is on the mesh in west yorks, or has a node on a mast near a farm up that
way,
own up. and if any sysop has thought about hanging a board off meshtastic i want to hear how badly it went.
Ive never heard of this before, but doing a quick google it looks interesting.
I will have to look into this a bit more I think :)
What do I need to get going?
You can get some pretty cheap (like, cheap enough that I have one) bare boards for Meshtastic from AliExpress or most places where fine electronic tat is distributed.
I've not had the best of luck with mine - it's super rare that I pick up *anything*, there is a node just out of range which I occasionally receive and I've no idea whether that has a reliable mesh connection. I suspect it does, because someone bothered to put it up a tree on a hill with a solar panel, but it's just out of range for me so I can't tell.
A year of running it in my loft, trying to "be the change you want to see" I've had a sum total of one conversation on it, with a guy who turned out to be two streets away, bored in work.
On my wild road trip to Hull I popped the board up on my dash - saw basically nothing on the way up so I spent the entire trip back sending "hello, anyone out there?" messages every few miles. I managed to get 2 messages acked but still not a single received message, far less a reply to one of mine.
But, I suppose, the barrier of entry is low - so have at it!
Still sounds like an interesting project ...
Any recommendations on a home base set up already built?
Hmm... I haven't really seen any dedicated fixed setups - it mostly seems to be a prepper thing so all the ones I've seen are portable. They do ones that are basically a blackberry form factor, but most of
them
are bare board or what is presumably a bare board in a very basic case. They connect to your phone / computer via bluetooth so I just had one of the bare boards up in the loft, powered by a USB adaptor and
velcro'd in place.
There is an interesting project somewhere integrating meshtastic with retro computers - I've not played with it (and can't even remember what it's called) but if there were nodes around here I'd definitely
be
writing an Acorn client for that :)
dont bother with the amazon premade stuff keyop, its the same esp32 board in a plastic box for double the money. get a heltec v3 or one of the lilygo ones, make sure the listing says 868 not 915 (i bought
the
wrong ones once, still sulking about it), flash it from the meshtastic site in a browser and thats it. home base is exactly wot bob said... bare board in the loft on a usb plug. the only bit worth spending
on
is the antenna. mine went from 300 yards to about 4 mile with a proper one on the van roof, the rubber duck it comes with is rubbish
and the mystery node on the hill is SOLVED. went up to the farm friday in daylight and the farmer said oh thats our lads. his son put it up two summers back and hes off at uni now, stock antenna shoved down
a
bit of plastic pipe with a solar panel on it. nobody has looked at it in a year, it just sits there repeating. farmer thought it was a weather thing hehe
bob worm... hull is the wrong way, come west. with me and the farm kid and your bored lad thats nearly a network <g>
| Sysop: | Keyop |
|---|---|
| Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
| Users: | 797 |
| Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
| Uptime: | 185:36:59 |
| Calls: | 13,202 |
| Calls today: | 1 |
| Files: | 15,490 |
| Messages: | 6,579,519 |