Recent supporters
Shawn Scarlett bought 3 coffees.
Can you help. I have access to a 300ft antenna tower and I am wanting to put a mesh device on it. What would be the best option, node, repeater, or router.
It would be used for hopefully texting 30 miles away to a group of friends.
Nick bought 2 coffees.
carlbatchny@gmail.com bought 5 coffees.
Hello Ben. I found you from your Meshtastic blog post "Choosing The Right Device Role". Great information! Our amateur radio club has a working group trying out a 4 user 9 node deployment in the mountains of Western NC. Two routers on prominent peaks, and the rest client and/or client mute. We're trying to figure out why group messages on a "channel" is hit and miss, with not all members seeing every message. Yet each user can very reliably do a "Request Position" from all nodes. We also see lots of direct messages not getting acknowledged (icon of a man with a check mark), yet lots of those actually make it to the recipient. Traceroutes also have a high success percentage.
We've deployed on LoRa slot 25 to minimize RF contention from other nodes on the default slot 20. We know that routers "always" retransmit as soon as there is no RF contention. Is there some small random back-off for routers to minimize collisions if 2 routers hear the same client? Is there a good write up on the client retransmit back off window? I saw somewhere that it's based in part on the received signal strength as a proxy for physical distance. We're wondering how that implementation combined with our mountainous terrane could contribute to poor group message performance.
Hi Carl, late reply here, but you might check out the new ROUTER_LATE role which essentially always rebroadcasts in the same way as ROUTER, but does so after all other roles have had a chance to. If you have too many Routers in relative proximity, it can certainly result in some contention with enough density. You might employ this new role on some of the sites currently provisioned as Routers that would help pick up the slack in terms of coverage without stomping on each other. The other thing I would try is taking some noise floor measurements with a spectrum analyzer or SDR. On my local mesh, we have had some success with good cavity filters and a Station G2 on strategic sites that have horribly high noise floors.
paul.quintana@cloudposition.net bought a coffee.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for all the work being posted for Meshtastic.
It looks like the port to Ambiq Apollo is a bit stale. Can you offer any insights as to why support is so limited? We would like to see Meshtastic on Ambiq if it is reasonable.
thanks,
Paul
Hi Paul, Sadly we ran into some major snags with the Apollo's platform / Arduino support, namely I think the big blocker for us was the lack of FreeRTOS thread support. It's worth circling back to, in order to see if any progress has been made on that front and we can give the effort a kick in the pants. 😁 Thanks!
achiappetta512@gmail.com bought 20 coffees.
Hey man, I really appreciate what you have done here. I am using your software to set up several nodes attempting to link our small town with Austin, TX, which is about 45 miles away, while setting up the corridor on HWY US71 along the way. If you get a chance, hit me back. I don't know how old school you are, but I am setting up a node to link with the DDial.com group. This was an 80's chat system. Its for fun. Cheers
Achiappetta512@gmail.com
Very cool! DDial was before my time, but I dig the retro integrations. It's been a long time since I've been in that neck of the woods, but I loved Texas hill country. Spent some time in Fredericksburg and loved that town. Glad you're getting some good use out of the project. Thanks for the support!
Quick question: While traveling from Texas to NC, I wonder if there is any way to broadcast a message continuously. Similar to "Hi, this is Tony driving thru. Hit me back on austinmesh.com to not this contact", a python script. I am aware of the range test feature, but I wanted a little different. thanks