Its a LILYGO T3S3 (a module focused on handheld use) stuck into a housing I modeled myself and 3d printed out of ASA plastic. It has some Chinese “high gain” 915MHz antenna inside the grain silo looking part, which is oversize to prevent too much signal reflection/distortion from the plastic being too close to the antenna. Its powered by 18ga alarm system wire that I draped down the roof to a 5v power supply on the deck. And since I’m renting, non permanent modifications only, thus the clamp to the vent pipe.

Its what I had, just to get started. Quickly realized I needed to be on my roof to get any good connections in my node-sparse area haha.

So far it’s working well, I have 13 consistent mesh connections with 3 direct connections, when before I would previously only get spotty connections to the mesh at all from inside my house.

I’ll buy some better base station hardware later, once I put one up at my girlfriend’s house a few miles away…

  • recursivethinking@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 hours ago

    ELIsysadmin?

    You mention a node sparse neighborhood. Nodes of what platform?

    Im gathering that there is a mesh network being slowly built? I have so many questions and concerns. What are we sharing and isn it bridged to the web and how are we isolating and securing.

    A link further down the rabbit hole would be fine.

    EDIT I’m an idiot and realized from the community name this is meshtastic. Rabbit hole here I come.

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
      0·
      7 hours ago

      Just note that many countries and cities are moving away from meshtastic to meshcore (same hardware, better protocol) due to scaling issues inherent in meshtastic

      Australia is pretty much entirely meshcore apart from some abandoned derelict meshtastic nodes

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        0·
        7 hours ago

        I did see meshcore before I got into this stuff, but my issue is meshcore seems less resilient in lower density areas where there may not be many people investing in well positioned base stations. Almost all my typical use cases are very rural, where every possible node contact matters, and I do not have the money or physical access to set up enough of my own good base stations.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      0·
      7 hours ago

      Haha, you have stumbled right into the nerd trap. Guessing you’re here from the All page.

      This is a community (!meshtastic@mander.xyz) for the Meshtastic project, a short instant messaging system via a mesh network built on unlicensed LoRa embedded radio hardware. Designed for pure peer to peer mesh networks to run totally off grid and allow local communication even when regular infrastructure goes down. They are very low power and the hardware is very inexpensive (the actual device inside this station cost less than $30) meaning many nodes can be deployed for network resilience.

      https://meshtastic.org/