Ok, let me be more specific. Of course it delivers the audio, so you can technically say that i “works”, that wasn’t up to debate, you can deliver anything, actually. The problem is that it will never be viable. You shouldn’t abuse the network, as it is a shared channel, when you use 2kbps to send your audio, no one else’s can use it for messages, and viceversa, relaying many messages will limit your bandwidth.

You are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, while instead there are tools designed for this purpose. It’s kind of silly developing a roundabout way to send audio through meshtastic while every other amateur radio ecosystem is already designed for audio.

There is no way to make this work. As others told you, hex made it bigger, because hex is like equivalent to base16. Every digit in base64 is 6 bit, while in hex it’s 4 bit. Raw bytes would be equivalent to base256.

You will not get a good result with this technology, it just can’t handle the bandwidth, and will make it worse for everyone else by consuming their shared bandwidth.

Instead, try to look into midi and sound fonts, that might give you a more sustainable solution.

Converting binary to base64 makes the data 33% bigger, you should not do that when you have limited bandwidth

So, what gain do you think I can expect from that antenna?

What if there is no node in my area? Will a high gain antenna reach farther nodes?

Also, do you have a suggestion for the antenna, or should I just try using the included one and buy another if it doesn’t work? I’m worried it might be a 915 antenna instead of 868, because the device allows choosing the frequency.