this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
18 points (95.0% liked)
Meshtastic
611 readers
39 users here now
A community to discuss Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, you can get two nodes, one of which would be a router, and then one you can have in client mute mode, and you can set the router to be administered remotely by your node in client mute mode, which would make most configurations able to be done remotely. It might still be best to climb the tower to update it, say once or twice per year, just to keep the firmware up to date with all the newest functionality, though. I'm honestly not exactly sure how much traffic it can handle. I know that in my area we only have about 10 total nodes and it handles that just fine as well as quite a few nodes sometimes when we get band openings. I would say just best guess at least 40 or 50 with no problem before you need to move to a faster mode such as MediumSlow. I have heard ShortFast can handle several hundred clients with no problem and most areas would have no need for that unless you're at an event of some sort.
Edit: I am rather new to it myself only having had mine for about a month now. From what I have heard, you want to keep your channel utilization under 30%. It's fine if it goes over it sometimes during busy moments, but if it starts approaching 30% on average over like a week or something like that, it might be time to move to a faster mode, such as MediumSlow. Our channel utilization with 10 nodes only seems to be about 5% on average, which makes me think it can handle quite a few more. Our router here reports its data twice per day so I just added all 14 channel utilization numbers up and then divided by 14 in order to get the average over the week.
Edit 2: If there is already a router in your area that's higher than the one you propose, then yours should not be in router mode. It should be in client mode because the other router is higher.
Thanks for the quick response.
Im happy that uptime seems to be as good as you say, and not having to worry about excessive traffic for the future is nice.
I will have highest access point for my area from my grain bin elevator and it looks so far like im alone in this experiment here. I can also get access to another high location or two. Its definitely enough to "paint the town" so to speak. Nothing else even remotely close in the area according to meshmap.net so ive got a nice sandbox to play with all by my lonesome. Small town perks i guess.
Ill do some small scale playing around before i start climbing or aquiring more hardware, but this looks like fun. When i am satisfied on doing low elevation tests, ill definitely be interested in best hardware for a router, but i can take this step by step for now and be happy with learning. It helps that this all seems, at least at first glance, to be fairly straight forward so far as hardware requirements.
oh then by all means please do I think you will very much enjoy it. Mesh map is definitely a good starting point, but it's not entirely believable. For example, it says we have two nodes in my area on Mesh map, and yet I know for a fact that we have at least ten that occasionally pop up, most of which do not offer their location and therefore are not on Mesh map. There are two decently large cities of over 100,000 people, 70 miles away in opposite directions from me, and one of them says it has five nodes, and the other says it has three nodes. And I'm almost certain there's more than that. So MeshMap is a good start point but not totally reliable.