Meshtastic

I've been brainstorming ways to get a permanent node on my truck for various reasons. Here's what I have so far:

• Hard-wired for power. The vehicle battery is pretty large, and I have a solar-maintainer installed with enough power left over to run a node.
• GPS module for tracking
• External antenna (915 MHz). I already have cargo racks on the truck bed so plenty of space to attach a mount.

Unfortunately I haven't found much in the way of hardware guides. Initially I figured a 33 cm ham antenna would be perfect but haven't seen much available. For the node itself I was looking at either a heltec tracker or a Wisblock with location module. Anyone suggestions?

Hey everyone, I hope this is ok to post here! I've been putting off getting into meshtastic for a while now but the time has come to play around with it. I have done some research but I always like to talk to real people if possible for real world advice and experience, not just youtube salesman and AI top ten lists. I have minimal experience with radio, but some.

As to meshtastic the research I've done has pointed me to a few LoRa boards, the heltec t114 v2, and the Lilygo t-beam, and also the Lilygo T-deck plus.

I really would love to have a phoneless standalone set up, but have seen some stuff about the T-deck lacking good firmware and so it isn't "ready," but then I've seen some people say to the contrary that some good firmware exists now. Are there other better phoneless devices for meshtastic? Is the t-deck good enough now that I could pick that up now and add some t114s later to expand the network? Or should I go with a couple t114s, and wait til phoneless matures a little?

As for the phone using set ups, are there other boards I should look at instead of the t114 and the t-beam? I do require either it to come with a case or have available .stl files to print one, I suck at CAD.

My final questions are to the antennas, is there an antenna manufacturer that is commonly recommended for meshtastics (915 khz), and am I looking for SMA female or SMA male connectors on the antenna, or does that depend on the board in question? I tried searching the product page for the heltec board and SMA isn't mentioned anywhere according to ctrl+f. I see some kits with an antenna on amazon, but they don't mention either and I'm sure I'll want to upgrade the dinky rubber ducky it comes with.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, double thanks if you responded, triple thanks if you have answers or any helpful links! I'm excited to be getting into the hobby here soon, and glad there's already a lemmy comm for it!

So I bought some heltec V3 to get into meshtastic and I did a range test on the beach and in my neighborhood. I get 1 Km ai can't get confirmation that the message was received on the meshtastic app

Context is I'm in 915 Mhz ism band. Neighborhood died have the forest and the beach was windy so lots of water particles in the air. And ill say I used the stock attennas. And I'm in standard long fast encoding

Is this typically performance

So I was interested in mesh comms years ago. Serval mesh and other wifi meshes were of interest, but never seemed to actually... work.

Then I got a couple of Gotennas. Used them once at a festival and then they went in a box.

Got them out about a year ago and tried to use them, discovered the company who made them decided to stop support for the common plebs who got them kickstarted, and now only do commercial / military apps. Greeeat. Look into HAM radio for the APRS, but hear from a friend that used to do it that in our country it's a higher level license to do any data, lot of expense and time, and thus there were few people actually doing it, so decide not to go that route. They mention Meshtastic briefly.

Skip forward and see a mention of the T1000-E... yes, I think this is the solution. Buy 4, and then a few days later see mention of the Station G2. Buy one.

They arrive and I get them set up and have a tinker... now it's time to start telling other people and ask if they can help me test.

I live in a really small rural town of 300 people at 500m on a sortof plateau (small gradients around town) in a mountainous region, couple of hours from a major city. The power fairly regularly goes out, usually from trees dropping power lines in heavy wind, and this is only going to get worse with climate change. Power out means no broadband. If the power is out more than a few hours, no cell connection either (which isn't great to begin with). So here is a clear use case for local comms in emergencies a few times a year at least.

So I contact two local friends and ask if they would be interested in testing a new radio mesh thing. Unbeknownst to me, BOTH of them actually have experience in HAM / CB radio.

They both are keen to have a play and I give the first a T1000-E a few days back, and with a bit of trial and error, we get a stable connection between our houses that are about 400m apart. This is without even getting antennas on roofs. Then yesterday other friend comes over and I give them a T1000-E and he pops back home - only about 200m to his place. Easy connection, no issues. Other friend is away during the day but I announce on LongFast that we have grown the mesh, but I go to sleep before he gets back.

I wake up this morning to find a smatter of conversation between them after I went to bed, and this is my favourite comment:

"I look at the s/n ratios and think it's impossible, but it works. Some very clever design and tech."

😀

So hopefully, we will get more people interested and even potentially a connection to two other towns nearby. Both have significant hills in the way and one is in a twisty windy valley, so we'll need to get creative or maybe need to set up private mqtt server to relay between key nodes but aware that won't be useful in emergency situation with no internet/cell data, but we're learning as we go: I'm happy to have two people on board with more experience than me too.

#meshtastic

Made a python script to create posts via meshtastic messages. If you can see this, the test worked! Posting from the park with no mobile data ^_^

I'm just digging in to it and setting up "Rnodes" with my heltec v3's and sending files and voice is cool.

The nomad network is a markdown internet, and it all works over Lora or any other network.

Lots to learn still but it looks promising as a mesh data network.

I'm interested in this project, but I am unsure if there's anything actually useful or fun you can do with it.

So tell me about the fun stuff you've built!

I have just unpacked and flashed my new t-deck and I'm very excited! Sadly, i had to use some google drive provided old firmware (2.5) since I can not figure out how to find(, build) and upload the firmware.

Having worked with esp32s in the past, i know of the many different ways to flash them (platform.io, webflashers, esptool, etc) but I'm missing something.

Where is the "fancy ui" actually from and how do you build it? I was just told to clone, build and upload the latest from github. (https://meshtastic.org/docs/development/firmware/build/) but that just flashes the crappy ui which I have no idea how to use.

Very thankful for any help! Thanks!

(alt text: picture shows t-deck with "fancy ui" and a chat of two people sending test messages, indicating that it works)

I have just unpacked and flashed my new t-deck and I'm very excited! Sadly, i had to use some google drive provided old firmware (2.5) since I can not figure out how to find(, build) and upload the firmware.

Having worked with esp32s in the past, i know of the many different ways to flash them (platform.io, webflashers, esptool, etc) but I'm missing something.

Where is the "fancy ui" actually from and how do you build it? I was just told to clone, build and upload the latest from github. (https://meshtastic.org/docs/development/firmware/build/) but that just flashes the crappy ui which I have no idea how to use.

Very thankful for any help! Thanks!

(alt text: picture shows t-deck with "fancy ui" and a chat of two people sending test messages, indicating that it works)

So there is a router 3.7 miles from my house that i can hear between 2 and 5 SNR but its hearing my transmissions between -4 and -18 SNR with a -10 average (5 traceroute tests). Shouldn't it be able to hear me just as well as I can hear it? I can only think of two possible causes for this.

1. The router has a much higher noise floor than I do
2. The router antenna is more than 33cm tall and has directional lobes and null zones.

However, that second explanation seems off simply because if it wasn't transmitting my direction, I shouldn't be able to hear it as well as I can.

Thoughts?

Edit:

3. My antenna is not a full 33cm So does not radiate the signal efficiently.

So I just saw a video where somebody made a bulletin board system over the mesh like it's fucking 1999 or something and it got me thinking Would it be possible to send web pages over the mesh as long as they were small?

I went to the DuckDuckGo homepage and copied its HTML source code into a text editor and found out it was something like 46,000 characters and with a 288 character limit it would take 145 messages to send that across. Each message would be something like 0.69% of that page.

It doesn't seem impossible, but you would have to make your pages very lightweight like they were in the 1990s in order to do it efficiently.

In densely populated areas, such as cities, it seems like it would be more advantageous to use shorter, faster presets, such as MediumSlow, MediumFast, ShortSlow, or ShortFast instead of the default LongFast.

How would you go about connecting these together without using the internet? I think MQTT could do it, but that would require at least one server somewhere that has no net connection and one radio for each speed. Is there another way that I might be missing?

I think you would also have to be careful with how much data you put onto the slower speed network.

Edit: example: MediumSlow is 82% faster than LongFast.

Last night, my node showed that it received information from a node 100 miles away, and I dismissed it as just a weird artifact. But tonight, my node is showing that there are three nodes that are around 220 miles away. I do not have MQTT enabled on downlink so they are definitely over RF. But how is that even fucking possible? I live in an area where the mesh is not super well built up and there are only a few people locally that have nodes and I would expect to get nodes from a lot closer than 200 miles away or even 100 miles away considering there are two decently large cities only 70 miles away. Also, so far I have only gotten these messages at night.

Edit: Correction, they are between 270 and 320 miles away.

I just bought a SeedStudio SenseCAP T100-E. I only see 1 node in my area on meshmap.net and doubt i will be able to hit it. I will just have to add myself to the mqtt map to let others know a new node exists in my area.

I got a LoRa hat for Raspberry Pi and my Pi 3 is broken, so I'm wondering if anyone has tried it on a Pi 2. I don't see it mentioned on the site and whenever I try installing meshtasticd it fails because of dependencies (not sure if that has anything to do with the Pi, but figured I'd bring it up in case.)