Yeah I believe you’re right. Though I didn’t find anyone else locally even going to the highest hill in town

Thanks for the advice 👍

Even if it’s 40ft up on a tower at my house?

To be clear, I haven’t put any permanent nodes up, just trying to understand how to do it properly. I was definitely originally planning on putting that one in router mode.

Also there are zero other nodes in my area.

Your welcome! I actually updated my comment already, probably while you were typing yours 👍

I ended up buying one, though I’m not opposed to building my own. At these frequencies though I imagine it starts to get a little fiddly.

I bought this one.

I tested it on my nanovna but I don’t remember the specifics, I’ll have to put it on again when I get home. If I remember correctly the bandwidth was about right, roughly 30mhz wide to cover the whole ISM band.

The insertion loss might’ve been .5 or 1.5db, the latter of which seems high. I’ll check and report back. I was pretty excited to get it on a node so I didn’t take notes.

Edit: Here’s the sweep of the filter. I did take care to calibrate it first. If I’m reading this correctly, it’s pretty much what I remember. 30mhz bandwidth, 1.5db insertion loss, decent 40-50+ ish db attenuation in the stop bands.

The numbers got weird when I widened the sweep, which doesn’t inspire confidence in this tool or my ability to use it, but you can still see the pass and stop bands clearly, so… 🤷‍♂️

Hi there! Thanks!

You’re right it’s a radio thing. There are many types of radio things, this is just one piece of one of them.

This community focuses on meshtastic, which is a communication protocol that rides on top of LoRa. LoRa is a type of radio signal, kind of like how AM and FM radios are different, this is a little different too. It’s designed for low power, free and legal to use, long range communication.

The beauty of meshtastic is in the name, it’s a mesh. So all the radios talk to each other and relay messages to increase the distance you can send messages.

This picture is a simple example of that:

Use cases include everything from long distance emergency communication to friends keeping in touch while camping or hiking with no cell service. There’s way more, but that’s the idea.

Companies have made similar products before, but they’ve always been fairly expensive. But these LoRa meshtastic radios are only like $20-30, so it’s really easy to get started. And they are more flexible.

There’s more to it, but that’s the main idea. The thing I made in the original post was an antenna, trying to improve the range of my radio. It worked about as well as a store bought one, which I guess is better than it doing worse 🤷‍♂️

You make a very good point. Another concern I am finding out about is leakage current. Perhaps my capacitors are bad, in fact they probably are considering how cheap they were, but the leakage current appears to be pretty high.

I think I’m going to grab a couple from mouser or digikey to compare them with, and probably send these back.

Right now the leakage current is somewhere between 80 and 100ma, enough to use up the capacity of a small solar panel.

Yeah a bummer. But I’ve still got plans to get some height, and I’ve got some friends who are gonna join in on the fun, I’m hoping we can mesh our houses 😁

Yep everything is default. US, longfast 🤷‍♂️

We’ll see what happens when I get a node up even higher. Maybe I can tap into an existing mesh from the outskirts

So far no nodes other than the two I bought. I got the upgraded longer antenna, and went out on my second story balcony in a suburban area, nothing.

Looks like I’ll be the change I want to see in the world haha.

So far no nodes other than the two I bought. I got the upgraded longer antenna, and went out on my second story balcony in a suburban area, nothing.

Looks like I’ll be the change I want to see in the world haha.

So far no nodes other than the two I bought. I got the upgraded longer antenna, and went out on my second story balcony in a suburban area, nothing.

Looks like I’ll be the change I want to see in the world haha.

Nice!

Honestly the Amazon antenna will probably do perfectly fine, I might go that way for simplicity sake… maybe I’ll build an antenna too and do some a/b comparisons.

The 90 degree angle doesn’t hurt performance inherently, it only hurts it because it puts the antenna right next to the body of the radio, blocking some of the signal, and detuning the antenna slightly as well. So you’re still better off putting it vertical 👍

Also in case you didn’t know, those antennas are vertically polarized. That means when the tip is pointing up to the sky, the signal is coming out the sides going off towards the horizon. That’s the best way to get a signal out/in. Holding it sideways will create null points from the tip and base of the antenna, and also send half your signal into space and the other half in the ground 😁

Looks sweet. I might end with something like that eventually, but honestly I really like the idea of using my phone and just linking the mesh device to it. Reminds me of the old goTenna before they sold out.

Do you have somewhere high you could mount a repeater/router node to? Like the chimney of your house or something? Would make it even easier to connect with people, at least from home.

I’m planning on putting a few up, one at my house and each of my buddies houses.

Seems like most people are saying there’s way more nodes than the map shows. It’s not a guarantee though. I say give it a try!

Good to know, looking forward to it!

That’s way different! Good to hear!

Thanks! You mean I should get some of those sma adapters and some of those little stick antennas? Or something even bigger? Recommendations?

I’m a ham and I’ve got a nanovna, I could try making a ground plane antenna for 915mhz.

My plan is to put a repeater/router up on my tower 30ft up, as well as on a couple of my friends roofs, hopefully making a stable emergency channel between us. I’m between my buddies, 13 miles between the furthest ends, I’m almost in the middle.