US Nebraska

[hard heath]

If it's reliable I don't really mind, but it isn't reliable. And it adds an unnecessary hop

Whoever it is holds a special place for me since he/she was the first node I picked up with a stock Heltec and stubby antenna while standing on my roof. But times are changing and he/she needs to get with them!

[remote zephyr]

Yeah the mesh sure is vulnerable to misconfigured nodes, I hate to think about what a malicious node could do

[hard heath]

Yeah that's a scary thought.

It doesn't help for current issues, but I wonder if the devs could write in something to the firmware where if a role is deprecated for some reason, the device would automatically revert to client role. The 'trigger' could just be connection to a node with newer firmware. I can't see it being used much really, but I wish something like that was in place for situations like this. Though I could see it being abused and/or exploited too.

There was some talk of newer firmware nodes starting to ignore nodes in router_client by default at some point going forward, but even that could be really disruptive when not all nodes are said newer firmware. The 'ignore' function is really just for blocking messages from a nonpreferred node. I wonder if it blocks just direct messages or even relayed messages. Hopefully the former.

[quasi beacon]

It does nothing with the message. No ack, no rebroadcast, nothing shows up in the logs. This would be helpful for someone spamming the channel. For someone in router/repeater mode that shouldn't be, one of the issues is the early rebroadcast that can step on better placed router nodes trying to rebroadcast at the same time. "Ignore" won't help with that.

It's a good question though if messages rebroadcasting from an ignored node still make it through. I'm pretty sure they do, because there is no trace routing as a message hops. I believe only the node ID from the originator travels with the message.

[remote zephyr]

I'm in Lincoln and actually see a node

Trying to send in the discord Link but it's not going through

[quasi beacon]

I stopped in on EBT today and set to ignore 12cc. It has already dropped 2-3% TX time. This should save a couple of watt-hours of battery consumption per day!

And channel utilization hasn't gone above 25% on EBT since! Hopefully this holds!

[narrow ledge]

I was out on the bike this weekend with REDX and I heard your yagi test around 10:48 at the Wabash Trace trailhead park off Harry Langdon. I tried to reply, but my messages on the public channel never got an ACK.

The FA16, RED1 and/or RED2, RED3 are not on permanent power yet, and were likely down when you were doing your test. I will work to get at least one of those on dedicated power soon.

[quasi beacon]

Nice! Did you pick up anything else on the trail?

[hard heath]

Nice - thanks Scott!

[narrow ledge]

Unfortunately, I did not. I did bring some gear with me for some field testing during a bike camping overnighter. I will post up some pics and words later.

[quasi beacon]

Impressive!! I've been meaning to ride the Wabash all the way to the MO border at some point with an overnight. Although probably a summer trip for me! 😂

[hard heath]

I never heard your reply, but that would have been a record distance for me round trip! 34km one way from what I can see. It has a 48 degree span and I had it painting downtown at the time, but it was picking up other things outside that window.

[narrow ledge]

It might have been related by other nodes. Is there a way to see the path of received messages?

[quasi beacon]

No, only if you see the most recent update in the node list and it shows an rssi/SNR reading (rather than x number of hops), or of you do a manual trace route and it comes back without any hops.

Although I guess if you check the logs on the message shows the same number of hops left that it started with, then you know it was direct.

[narrow ledge]

This weekend I went bike camping down the Wabash Trace to Mineola. I used the opportunity to bring some Meshtastic gear with me for some real world testing. It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but was still a useful exercise. I set up a client node at Margaritaville about 6 miles south of CB. At camp I set up another in the branches of a tree (higher than the one shown in the photo) about 10 miles down the trail. Finally I had my T1000E on me. Only once did I get any update from the Margaritaville node. The terrain out there is challenging for RF. I might try again later with nodes closer to each other or better placed. I did not see any other traffic south of CB.

[quasi beacon]

Sweet setup on the bike! How cold did it get overnight? And yeah, range from node to node without extra height or extra TX power is pretty limited.

[quasi beacon]

So if you catch the message in time before the log fills up, if "hop start" and "hop limit" are the same number, it was a direct message. Otherwise, the difference between those numbers was the number of hops to reach you.

[distant kettle]

FWIW my true position is towards the south edge of the precision-reduced GPS position I'm transmitting. If you want to really dial it in, shoot for the CHAP Center at 1201 Gregg Rd. I'm a stone's throw from there.

Judging by signal strength, EBT seems to be close enough that if it fell out of the tree it might hit me on the head, so that should get you EBT too

also for the record I mostly monitor agv3 (same location) right now, agov is connected to a PC and being used for an experiment. I am working on coming up with a better naming scheme :p

[narrow ledge]

The tracker card got the data for me. It was 29° in my tent at the lowest. But light wind and an abundance of firewood made it quite pleasant.

[quasi beacon]

Not bad for December in the Midwest!

[narrow ledge]

Here’s some more insight into the operation of the tracker card. This log excerpt shows the channel utilization and battery for a portion of my trip. It’s neat to see the correlation of channel utilization to my movement. I don’t think there were any nodes receiving my GPS telemetry out in the country, however.

[hard heath]

This is very helpful - thank you! It does change my bearing setting and I'll take it into account. Ideally I'd like to split the beam between the Old Market and you as well as EBT. I think that's within the capabilities without needing to move it, but having the option to point it remotely would be nice too.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, auto aiming would be awesome! If it's a wide enough beam pattern like Merlin, I think you'll be able to cover Bellevue and downtown.

Just saw you mentioned 48 degree pattern earlier. Probably a good chance that works if you split the difference and aim towards south O.

[hard heath]

That's what I was thinking too. Though the specs are not very clear and say 40/48 degree beam, but don't specify which is horizontal and which is vertical.

An auto aiming device could be cool. I could use steppers like a telescope mount for horizontal and vertical movement. Maybe a compass or accelerometer board too for measuring the bearing and vertical pitch. It would be easy to go overboard.

[tawdry compass]

I think a good spot for a node might be Hitchcock park campground or on top of Crescent. I think it would be great for downtown and north O + CB

[narrow ledge]

Just put FA16 back on the roof. This time with a little bit of a westerly view.

[remote zephyr]

i'm seeing it 3 hops

[quasi beacon]

I've tested radio stuff from the top of the tower at Hitchcock. Can confirm a 22db Lora device can reach to a good station in Bellevue (this was with Helium.) I think a sweet location to cover those areas would be the tower in little Italy, half way between the zoo and downtown.

[remote zephyr]

i camped at the high backpacking camp site at hitchcock facing omaha and could hear a node every now and then but could not get an ack, but that was with the included heltec v3 non sma antenna

[narrow ledge]

Hi folks! I see a couple of nodes running with BBS in the name. Are these actually bulletin board systems? How do I access? Any hints? Are the operators here on the discord?

[quasi beacon]

Yep! Just send the node a DM and it should respond with an options menu. Heads up, the reliability isn't great if you're more than a hop away. I have occasionally gotten into them, but struggled to navigate consistently. If you search YouTube for meshtastic bbs, there's a couple good videos on the topic.

[tacit schooner]

I run the doopy node, feel free to test it out. It’s not super consistent like amc said but it’s pretty fun

[narrow ledge]

Neat! I’ve tried sending DMs to the BBS but no response. Last time I checked I was 4 hops away.

[distant kettle]

I suspect that FA16's performance may be affected a bit by multipath issues from all the buildings down there. Basically the signal "echoing" off of the buildings etc so that the echoes overlap each other and make packets unreadable

It is possible that this might be helped by a higher gain antenna with a flatter pattern, or something

Briefly saw a contact all the way out in Columbus, NE earlier today

[tawdry compass]

Yeah, good Idea.

[quasi beacon]

Was that super early this morning around 5 or 530? I was on a flight from OMA to DFW and saw the Columbus node... But had the T1000 on mute, so I don't think it should have relayed any packets from there. Also saw ~5 in Lincoln.

[distant kettle]

actually, by "earlier today" I meant like yesterday afternoon, oops

[quasi beacon]

Also picked up an Omaha node from 300+km away with 2 hops, the final transmit had to have been another Omaha node but couldn't get a trace.

[distant kettle]

Lol wow

[quasi beacon]

Oh interesting... Maybe a different flight. Can't imagine that route would happen on the ground!

[distant kettle]

just picked up another airborne node

[wooden mulch]

What does the realistic battery life look like on the T1000-E?

[remote zephyr]

@narrow ledge ? I think he was saying 2 days wasn't an issue, but not sure how much he had left

[wooden mulch]

Thanks! I just ordered two Heltec V3's that should be here tomorrow.

[narrow ledge]

I seem to get two days with mine. I’ve been carrying it with me most of the time. I just ordered a second. I hope to test them out on group bike rides soon.

[distant kettle]

like everyone else said, about 2 days with the standard configuration, but if you do things like disable the integrated GPS, run it in CLIENT_MUTE, etc. you can squeeze out more

the GPS draws more current than everything else put together

well, averaged over time, anyway. The LR1110 does peak higher while transmitting

[hard heath]

Forgive me if I'm misremembering, but was someone here working on an Omaha Mesh website? Something that would give info on how to set up nodes, etiquette on roles and telemetry updates, etc.?

I was thinking about building a node to transmit at the maximum power allowable under a ham license (10W), then change the name to either an Omaha Mesh website or maybe a short link for this discord channel. It wouldn't be monitored and would never be used for Tx (would have to be unencrypted anyway). The whole point would be a really loud node with a good chance of being seen by new people that would hopefully visit the site.

[remote zephyr]

can you talk on the default LongFast channel when using a ham license, it's technically encrypted but just with a shared known key

[quasi beacon]

This was my understanding as well.

[quasi beacon]

Not sure I follow "never be used for TX" , but also being seen by new nodes. The node info updates would still be transmitting encrypted (I think?) which I didn't think was allowed for ham.

But it's a good thought. If there was a website in the future, we could add it to the name of one of the router nodes.

[remote zephyr]

Yeah someone just has to set it up

[hard heath]

Yeah I could have worded that better. Or just done better research. I meant it wouldn't be used for speaking on LongFast or sending direct messages except to another ham, given that it wouldn't be able to use encryption. I guess it would just 'exist' and broadcast node info, which of course is still Tx. I'm assuming that wouldn't be encrypted either, but I'm assuming all the other nodes would still be able to see it. And at higher power (10ish watts) it would be hard to miss

[remote zephyr]

if i was going to do all that i'd just put it on a diffrent frequency and have it on a seprate mesh altogether

[hard heath]

I may do that eventually if I build a couple of them. But having a node with the name advertising a resource for local info on the mesh would be nice. Chicago does something like that, or at least they were when I was visited.

[quasi beacon]

I just landed in Chicago and saw this. 😂

[hard heath]

Do they still have one up? It's been a while since I visited

[quasi beacon]

The bbs node is a 1 way connection to my T1000 though. Can't get into the bbs

Not as many nodes flying over as I expected though. Guessing a lot of them are using private channels on other frequencies.

[wooden mulch]

Do most people have MQTT enabled on the default channel? Right now I have 2 nodes, both set for Client_Mute role so they arent stepping on each other. Only difference is one has MQTT enabled with the root topic as msh/US/NE/# Uplink and Downlink enabled on default channel. the other i have MQTT disabled. I am brand new to this and trying to figure out what MQTT does and doesnt do.

[remote zephyr]

i think for the around here in a populated area you general want MQTT disabled for everything

[wintry wraith]

That’s my node! Lol

Feel free to join our discord if you want as well

Looks like it was down but I just fixed it

Send a dm to dfix saying “Cmd”

It’ll show you some commands

[quasi beacon]

I'm back in Omaha now, but thanks for checking in! How'd you stumble across this?? 😂

[hard heath]

I agree with elicriffield. It seems like almost everyone in the Omaha mesh disables MQTT. What are the names of your nodes? And what general area are you in? A lot of us use fixed GPS coordinates to show general area while still maintaining some privacy.

[wintry wraith]

Every so often I search for the word Chicago on this server

[brisk mica]

That would fall in a very gray area. FCC regulations never actually mention encryption, but do say, "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning" are prohibited. You could argue that a publicly published key would mean it wasn't intended to obscure the meaning. But I doubt this interpretation would be readily accepted if you were ever called out on it.

[remote zephyr]

what about relaying an encrypted message you can't even decode?

could a ham do that?

[brisk mica]

a ham is not allowed to relay a message that is illegal

[brisk mica]

Amateur radio licenses and meshtastic don't really mix.

[remote zephyr]

Yeah seems like they should of just left that out of the config as an option because when i first saw it my first thought was "i'm a ham, i should check yes"

[hard heath]

If you change channels and only ever use fully open (no encryption, even public keys) I would think that would be fine. Unless the node in 'ham mode' would continue to relay messages encrypted in any fashion. I need to learn more about all this.

My half baked idea of changing the name to a website or link to discord is inappropriate as well. Mesh docs say your long name must be your call sign in Ham mode, and that it will 'publicly transmit' the call sign every ten minutes. The docs also caution to make sure you're editing the default LongFast channel to pull encryption

[tacit schooner]

Speaking of the website, I spun up a basic Wordpress site on my homeland but haven’t had much time to configure it much. Once I get it somewhat setup, I’ll reverse proxy it through cloudflare so it’s secure and share it with you all.

So if anyone is good at Wordpress, lmk lol

[remote zephyr]

I think you would have to change frequency to

[hard heath]

Yeah for best results in an area already congested with encrypted traffic that would make the most sense. It'd be nice if they added that to the official mesh page discussing ham mode

[wooden mulch]

Blackout1 and Blackout2 near 132nd and Maple. One is currently set as client the other is set as client_mute.

[hard heath]

Yep I've picked those up at work and at home

[wooden mulch]

With nodes set up at your home, are most people putting them on their wifi networks and connecting to them that way? Or using Bluetooth? I have 1 on WiFi connected to an old phone and the other on my daily cellphone via Bluetooth. I miss a lot of messages on the Bluetooth connected node. It seems like the Bluetooth connection times out.

[tawdry compass]

Depends on the device. some phones or tablets suck with meshtastic bluetooth

I have one good phone, and one good tablet for meshtastic on bluetooth.

Never miss much

[wooden mulch]

I guess it could also be that the node on WiFi is outside on my patio and the node on BT is inside, some messages could be the "end of the line" at the outside node and not getting forwarded again for the indoor node to pickup...

[hard heath]

I use WiFi with my home nodes but have to switch between the two at the moment given that one is omni and the other is directional. WiFi is much faster than BT at any rate. But my mobile nodes are all BT.

Some mesh devices have awful BT connectivity. The original T114 was hot garbage. V2 is supposed to be better but I'm still waiting on my replacement.

[uneven zinc]

What client do you use with WiFi nodes? Just the web based one?

[hard heath]

Android app on my phone. I tried the web interface but it's not for me. Switching between nodes is a bit clunky and doesn't always switch 'cleanly'. Usually I need to switch to 'None (Disable)' in between nodes for a couple seconds.

[remote zephyr]

i just tried the android app on my phone with a direct usb-c cable to a node and man that's a lot snappier

[tacit schooner]

i didnt know that was posisble

[remote zephyr]

Yeah works great

[tacit schooner]

do you think it would work on apple? lol

[remote zephyr]

not sure about iphone, someone try it and let's see

[tacit schooner]

let me go find a bidi usb c

so it powers the device, but i still need bluetooth it seems

[remote zephyr]

bummer

[tacit schooner]

did you have to enable any special features or functions on the phone or radio?

[remote zephyr]

nope it just poped up "would you like something something to be able to talk to something something" and i clicked yes then in the app where you select what to connect to

[tacit schooner]

damn apple and their want to block everything

[uneven zinc]

Ah. Apparently WiFi only works on Android. Oh well.

[wooden mulch]

Oh that's rough!

[tacit schooner]

the new software has a built in web ui now!!

[hard heath]

Seeing a lot of new nodes lately. but for some reason I'm also getting other notifications about 'new' nodes that aren't new and are already in my node database. Like it will say 'new node' and list one I regularly see updated every hour. Weird.

[tacit schooner]

I’ve been seeing the same on my mature nodes

[wooden mulch]

I turned my new node notification off in my android notification settings after about 10 minutes of setting up and connecting to my first node. After the 5th or 6th notification in a row I decided that was enough 🤣

[hard heath]

Glad I'm not the only one!

[hard heath]

Yeah I should turn mine off. Back when there were only a handful of nodes in Omaha it was REALLY exciting to get that notification. With so many false notifications I think it's time to shut mine off.

[quasi beacon]

Same

[quasi beacon]

You're probably right about this, I see it a lot with my home/mobile nodes.

[tawdry compass]

wondering how the ice is going to effect all outside nodes. especially the high ones.

[tacit schooner]

Alright... super basic and a long way to go but here is the start. side note: it is still riding on my domain name but i can look into something dedicated later on when its more fleshed out. I present a website:

https://omamesh.bdnets.net/

[tawdry compass]

everyone stay safe in this weather...

[hard heath]

Thanks for setting this up!

[hard heath]

First time I'm glad mine are in the attic. Telescope mount is still outside though. Under like six covers though

[tacit schooner]

Here is the google sheet for the website node list, feel free to add your devices. Just use caution so you dont mess with previous entries:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h7gyXxhEXMfcEgUvb9pdSns0uRFKNk5cT2-3GHuARjQ/edit?usp=sharing

[wooden mulch]

Aside from using the radio config menu and using NodeBD Reset, is there a way to clear the node database automatically after a certain timeframe? Like anything over 4 hours is automatically removed from the list?

[tacit schooner]

i thought i heard/saw somewhere after so many, it starts writing over old ones but Im not certain or even how many the threshold is

[distant kettle]

I was, yeah

[tacit schooner]

you made one too?

[tacit schooner]

i just stood up ths site: https://omamesh.bdnets.net/

still a massive work in progress but a start

[distant kettle]

Just saw that! Still catching up with the conversation

but as I previously stated, I didn't want to be the only one responsible for it anyway in case I get hit by a bus, so I don't mind if someone else wants to work on something too. But obviously at some point it makes sense to unify our efforts so we don't have three competing Omaha mesh websites lol

[tacit schooner]

I agree, im hoping once things get more fleshed out I'll start setting people with blog rights and maybe even admin rights. wordpress makes that supre simple having a few trusted admins would be ideal

[distant kettle]

I started setting up a private uplink-only mqtt server so we can run this: https://github.com/tcivie/meshtastic-metrics-exporter

[tacit schooner]

thats awesome! that would be a really cool thing to have on the website

[hard heath]

This looks really cool. I know folks don't like to use MQTT for bridging communication between distance nodes, but it seems like there's a ton of really useful things it can do outside of that function. I really need to read up on it. That site references the Neighbor Info module. Is that something we should be turning on?

[distant kettle]

I have Neighbor Info on, it does some cool stuff. But if you're on the default primary channel config the Neighbor Info is not shared over LoRa and only available locally or over mqtt

and yeah, my mqtt is set up for uplink-only, so it just gathers information, no bridging

[tacit schooner]

is it just pulling from the default mqtt?

[distant kettle]

I'm running my own independent MQTT server. The default MQTT scrubs a lot of information because people were accidentally sharing more info than they meant to on there and then getting mad at the Meshtastic maintainers about it

I'll share the info in here possibly later this evening, still tweaking configs

[tacit schooner]

no problem, id be interested in checking it out sometime

[hard heath]

Me too. Happy to help test too

[tacit schooner]

what he said lol

[tawdry compass]

The problem with MQTT is that it kinda defeats the whole idea of a mesh. If you add the internet to the mix, what's the point? might as well just use your desktop, laptop, or phone for internet and billions of various apps and forums. Just my own opinion, but that's how I feel.

[tacit schooner]

I see your point, 100%. I just like the idea of being able to scrape metrics and whatnot. It’s just an uplink so it wouldn’t be used for comms

[uneven zinc]

I wonder if you could setup a MQTT server on a local network and treat it as sort of a UI to the mesh. That could be fun.

[tawdry compass]

I just like the idea of an independent, off the grid, encryption-available means of communication. I dunno, check with the other big mesh's like Chicago and Austin or even over in the UK and see what their experiences have been with MQTT? Just not understanding the need to bring the internet in. But hey, this isn't Ham radio, there aren't any regulations really. My only hope is that it remains usable for everyone.

[eager raven]

For a lot of these apps on a LAN MQTT is just getting the data from the node to the application. It doesn't bring internet into the mesh. I use MQTT on one of my nodes and it is just on my LAN for both meshtastic/atak integration and for metrics. I agree Astro that when its used to connect different meshs it kind of defeats the purpose.

[tawdry compass]

I just like the challenge of connecting nodes with radio. That's enough for me. Antenna's, placement of thereof, challenges of terrain, propagation, etc. Like I said, as long as it all remains usable, I'm cool with whatever you do.

[quasi beacon]

Even after Friday night, I have to say I share Astrobob's philosophy on this. 😂 But the way you're using it seems totally reasonable. I don't think anyone would be opposed to pulling data from the mesh for analytics/etc. as long as it doesn't impact mesh functionality.

[tawdry compass]

I've posted about this before, but I have been a solar enthusiast for some years now, I have fairly large portable systems I use when camping off the grid, at my rural property and cabin, and even at my home sometimes. I currently have a 50ah heated LifePo4 battery outdoors I am using for a testbed to see just how much mesh-related hardware I can run off solar unattended. I have a 25 watt panel for the solar. 1 watt photon-special node, and a PI4 for a load.

This is simply to see just how much I can get away with. Currently, the battery is at 69%. We'll see.

[tacit schooner]

That’s awesome, having test bed like that is really fun and I would love to thinker like that

[narrow ledge]

The talk about environmental conditions, heated batteries, etc. reminded me to post this picture of my T1000-E after it went through a complete wash and dry cycle in the laundry. I didn’t realize it until it was almost done. I kinda wish it was powered on, dutifully transmitting telemetry, but it was off. The temperature reading was after I pulled it from the dryer. You can imagine how relieved I was that it seemed to be performing normally. 😰

[tacit schooner]

That’s wild! Haha

[tacit schooner]

https://atlavox.com/products/atlavox-beacon-solar-meshtastic-node

Been following the release of these, looks amazing and some great options!

[narrow ledge]

At 4.8 miles, it wasn’t a particularly spectacular test, but it was fun to set up a mostly line of sight test over a distance from Fairmount Park to downtown Omaha. SNR 0.5 dB from my T1000-E on my bike to a Heltec V3 with 5 dBi antenna at home.

[quasi beacon]

Nice! Looks like this spot has great elevation. Were you able to pick up any other nodes directly?

[narrow ledge]

I did get a handful of new nodes discovered there, and other places while riding through CB. I’ve toyed with the idea of biking up to some of these high points and stashing a node with some high capacity batteries to test for a few days. I just worry about folks disturbing things.

[distant kettle]

Chicago is using MQTT the same way - uplink only, to a private MQTT server, purely to collect metrics etc

this does not in any way affect traffic on the mesh itself. it's one way data collection. if internet goes down you just aren't collecting that data anymore

it's pretty easy to make an MQTT server enforce uplink only - you just don't give the user login that the nodes use permission to subscribe to any topics

[tacit schooner]

i wish the apple app had the some connection options as andriod

and device history

its crazy how many options are missing comparing the two

[young kernel]

Hi all. I run a couple of nodes in Lincoln. I was in Omaha last week and was amazed to see how many more nodes have popped up in the last 6 months or so. I wish I could say the same for Lincoln. I know of only one other user (with a cluster of 3-4 devices) that has any appreciable footprint.

[quasi beacon]

Thanks for checking in. Yeah it has really exploded in Omaha. Usually around 50 active nodes on at any given time with over 100 on the list. I wonder if there are more in Lincoln that just aren't seeing each other? I flew out of Omaha last week and picked up 5 in Lincoln in a short time. If someone could get a router node up really high (maybe on a tower) it could connect all of those and possibly even bridge to Omaha.

[young kernel]

It is very possible that there are other nodes around that I'm just not seeing. I will say that I have done quite extensive range testing on my own setup from various topographically strategic places around town and haven't really come across anyone else. I did some testing earlier this fall from the top of the Capitol and only saw my own nodes and the one other cluster I already knew about.

[quasi beacon]

I bet the Omaha mesh (at least some of it) would reach to the top of the capital building at this point. Would be interesting to try that again.

I might have to give that a try next time I'm in Lincoln

[narrow ledge]

I like the iOS app, but wish I could connect via WiFi.

[tawdry compass]

amazing it survived. A testament to a quality build?

[narrow ledge]

My GF and I will be out biking around midtown neighborhoods tonight looking at holiday lights. Look for REDX and REDH on the move. It’ll be interesting to see how they work in this capacity.

[quasi beacon]

You're a trooper! My bike is hibernating for the winter. Some parts of midtown have great elevation, should be able to make some connections.

[tawdry compass]

Nothing new here, but a take on British Mesh:

https://youtu.be/qu1hOaePWTU?si=LHkQWT951Lad9WfN

[narrow ledge]

Hi Folks! Just for fun, and to help build my understanding, I’ve set up a few nodes on a private mesh. I’m kinda curious to see if they can communicate better than on the public mesh due to less congestion. You’re welcome to join it and help me test and play.

[narrow ledge]

https://meshtastic.org/e/#ChkSEMzAPZlwFOJ_xS48XaZwIB0aBU9NZXNoEgwIATgBQANIAVAeaAE

[narrow ledge]

Here’s the channel URL. The name is OMesh. The 128 bit key is zMA9mXAU4n/FLjxdpnAgHQ==

[remote zephyr]

I tried sending a message to OMesh

[narrow ledge]

Nothing seen yet. I’ll have a node up in a tower with me tomorrow and see if that helps.

[remote zephyr]

Left meshsense running overnight and here's the map it created, For some reason i'm not seeing anything downtown or midtown

[narrow ledge]

Impressive! I tuned my downtown nodes to OMesh last night. Currently have one up in a tall building right now on OMesh

[narrow ledge]

Do the lines mean 0 hops? When I was running meshsense from downtown I would see many of the same nodes, but very seldom would any be connected by lines.

[remote zephyr]

Yeah each line is a direct connection, it does a bunch of trace routes in maps those

[narrow ledge]

This really highlights the need for some well placed nodes at elevation in the midtown areas.

[hard heath]

I added the OMesh channel to PHHM, PHOF, and PHYG. Can add it to others as I get to them.

AMC and I did some testing last weekend on a separate channel from the standard channel 20. That severely cuts down on congestion, but also totally isolates nodes to the new channel. We had very reliable direct connections between EBT and PHYG, despite my Yagi not being pointed right at EBT. I had my brother switch X4RE (a 1 watt node with a large fiberglass antenna) over to the test channel too but unfortunately neither I nor EBT could pick him up. Going to set X4RE up with a big Yagi and aim it out a window towards Bellevue

[narrow ledge]

Cool! Just heard from a friend they heard and ACKed you from standing bear

[narrow ledge]

Did you add it as a channel, or make it your primary? Doesn’t it have to be primary in order to benefit from traffic relay and telemetry ?

[narrow ledge]

OMesh, that is

[hard heath]

I just added it as a channel. I could move it up to primary on another node though.

The tests AMC and I did were with different frequencies. I shouldn't have said those were a different 'channel'. It was a different frequency slot and we just stuck with LongFast and LongSlow

[young kernel]

If you all are looking for a good spot for a node with easy access and good elevation, there is a small radio shack (possibly ham-related) within Lewis and Clark Monument & Park in Council Bluffs that looked like a really good spot. I was in the parking lot last week and could easily receive ETB.

[remote zephyr]

i got three packets from that node near tokpeka, on at 10:19am and one at 4pm and one 7 mins ago

GPS must be off,

[remote zephyr]

yeah now i'm seeing it in town

[hard heath]

Got some stock to try making some more antennas. I could apparently attempt a 6.5 foot Yagi. Someone tell me this is a bad idea.

[remote zephyr]

what's the dBi gain on that suppose to be?

[hard heath]

15.3 according to DL6WU calculations. Seems low to me but maybe not. Beam width would be narrow.

[quasi beacon]

Weird that it doesn't show EBTs location. On my map it shows the same position as the agov nodes.

[distant kettle]

OMesh as a primary channel and OMesh as a secondary channel are most likely not going to interoperate, because the frequency slot used is chosen based on the name of the primary channel

Unless it's just on frequency slot 20, in which case it's not going to dodge congestion issues on the main mesh because it is on the main mesh

[quasi beacon]

Yeah I honestly I don't think congestion is an issue with the lack of connection downtown. It's just a tough spot based on topography. Need a really well placed node downtown or midtown to link up with the rest of the mesh.

[distant kettle]

I think a well placed router just slightly west or south of the downtown core would be ideal

[remote zephyr]

Like about 90th and dodge

[distant kettle]

Congestion of the mesh would probably show up more like inconsistent reachability than the near total unreachability of downtown nodes that we typically see.

I was thinking a bit farther east than that but that wouldn't be bad

[uneven zinc]

I was talking to a ham tonight at the aksarben meeting about meshtastic downtown. She suspects it could be interferance from a bunch of other 900 mhz stuff down there

[distant kettle]

Yes, that probably is a problem, as well as multipath issues from reflections off of all the buildings

[uneven zinc]

That too

A lot of density down there

[distant kettle]

My hope would be that having a nearby router would be sufficient to overcome those issues somewhat though

LoRa can be perfectly readable with a signal level below the noise floor, so it can overcome a decent amount of interference

Think it just needs that little bump

[uneven zinc]

True

We could try coordinating some mobile nodes around down there to see what can be heard

[distant kettle]

Definitely. I haven't been able to get out there lately but I'd like to do some testing downtown

I want to drop a node off somewhere on 13th street a few blocks south of old market and see if it helps link the downtown core at all

[quasi beacon]

The problem is the huge elevation gains to the south and the west of downtown. A good placement in little Italy or midtown in those high elevation areas would be helpful. Council bluffs could work too with a connection to EBT.

I'll actually be over in council bluffs all morning tomorrow. If I can wake up early enough, I'll set up a 1 watt mobile node to keep running in the car and see if that can link downtown to EBT.

[hard heath]

I've got a 1 watt node with a mag mount antenna parked near 19th and Harney. Can't see it at all. Spent most of the evening near 19th and Farnam, not even a block away. Two 1 watt nodes couldn't see each other. Concrete sucks.

[quasi beacon]

Wow, that does suck! 😂 Could either of them see any of the other downtown nodes? (Or are are all of those exclusively running on the private channel?)

[quasi beacon]

The channel utilization metric includes other non-meshtastic Lora traffic on the same frequency. Would be interesting to check what those isolated downtown nodes are seeing for channel util. The rest of the OMA mesh seems to hover around 10% but regularly sees 25+%.

[narrow ledge]

FA16 is three blocks away. I’ll keep my eye out.

[hard heath]

It's in a parking garage so I don't expect much. I'm actually heading out soon anyway

[quasi beacon]

I've got a solid connection to FA16 from the Iowa west fieldhouse

[quasi beacon]

What are the node names?

[hard heath]

PhotonAuto is the one in my car. PhotonExp is the other

[quasi beacon]

Haven't seen them yet but picking up x4re, FA16, and red3.

[quasi beacon]

Have you picked up FA16 at all? It seems to have pretty good coverage downtown

[hard heath]

I did on my home node via a VPN and my brother did on X4RE. Was also able to get a message through to X4RE from PHHM via VPN. Turns out I'm a bit of an idiot though and forgot to even turn PHAU on. I made a new 5V UPS for it and forgot the Killswitch.

[quasi beacon]

Sounds like something I would do!! 😂

[hard heath]

I do stuff like this all the time. I'll remember next time! Maybe.

My brother got a message through from X4RE to PHHM. First time that's ever worked. Sometimes mine reach him, but never the opposite before today

[quasi beacon]

Did he get a trace on it? @narrow ledge is FA16 on the roof semi-permanently now?

[hard heath]

Can't get a traceroute no matter what I try. I see FA16 and X4RE but traceroutes never complete.

[quasi beacon]

Hmmm, do you ever get direct to FA16? Wondering if it went through the mobile node in CB. Very strong signals to both FA16 and EBT.

[hard heath]

I assume that it did yeah but can't be sure. I'll try again in a bit

[narrow ledge]

No. It’s back my east facing window on 7th floor. I’m thinking of a permanent install up there but want to do it right. I’ll be asking for some advice on enclosures, antennas, or even devices for higher power.

[hard heath]

Got one through. Might just be because FA16 is such a popular node right now!

[narrow ledge]

I bet AM is the key here. He just needs to leave his car there all the time. 😹

[quasi beacon]

There's a new router node in CB. Are both your nodes direct to CWE?

[narrow ledge]

I often do, but. Haven’t seen it for a couple of hours.

[narrow ledge]

I wish I had taken a screenshot of my Meshsense map before AMC moved. His position near the MAC in CB did a lot to open up downtown to the larger mesh via EBT and other points out west and south.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, nothing special about the spot I was in. Just far enough East of the hills between the zoo and old market to have good LOS to both EBT and FA16. That's where the CWE node should be a great link but doesn't seem to be performing right.

I didn't see his messages on my home node this afternoon which means he's not reaching EBT. But that location should have a great connection, especially being on a 30ft pole.

Looks like last packet from CWE at my home node was 3 hops away 4hours ago. But with that location, should be a single hop through EBT

[quasi beacon]

Looks like congestion is an issue in the broader mesh. Some of my messages from CB this morning didn't get through. Around that time EBT was reporting 7% TX util and 20-40% channel util which is quite high.

[young kernel]

Went up to the top of the, um, Tower of the Plains again today around 1pm and spent time on each of the four observation decks. Picked up two new (to me) nodes. Signal was apparently able to pass through both the Capitol's mesh and Vega's window.

[narrow ledge]

Heathen / CWE: Are you on here?

[twin fern]

Yep, that's me! I saw your messages just a bit after you were gone, so I replied but it was never delivered.

I need to get that node in Ashland setup, I want to see if it can reach anything in Lincoln. I would hope at least from ontop the phallus of the plains it would let us bridge Lincoln and Omaha.

[hard heath]

What setup are you going with? Wondering if a higher powered node would help here. Sometimes more power doesn't do much at all though.

[twin fern]

I haven't figured that out yet. I'm still feeling a bit poor due to Chirstmas shopping plus a few other projects I needed to figure out first. I do think I'll be able to route a power cord to it though, so at least it wont have to run on solar.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, if the goal is to reach a 1 watt node in Omaha, I think running higher power makes sense. Otherwise it could end up being a 1 way connection, which I often see from EBT when I'm mobile with a low power node.

Since there aren't any high elevation routers in Lincoln, ideally you'd want to optimize the bridge node to hear everything in Lincoln, and then use the extra power to push to one of the high power/high elevation nodes in Omaha.

[hard heath]

I hear you on that. Rough time to allocate funds for other projects.

[young kernel]

Yeah, I'd have stayed up there longer, but I was already getting side-eyed by some of the other visitors. FWIW, I was using just a standard Heltec V3 with a decently tuned 90-degree whip (SWR <1.5 when straight) from behind the mesh window. Tried sticking it through the mesh, but the SWR on those when they're bent is pretty bad and even then it's hard to hold it so the antenna is vertical. At some point I'd like to try my hand at building a DIY Yagi, but not sure I'd be brave enough to walk around up there with it. I should to go out to Bunker Tanker Hill west of the airport again sometime to see if I can reach you from there.

[twin fern]

I don't know if that node had a GPS tag on it, did you see roughly where it's at?

[young kernel]

The nodes I saw where yours, my own home nodes (roughly US77 and Van Dorn), one without location from East deck, and a cluster that I already knew about near 27th and Nebraska parkway. I have also picked up a node east of the Sandhills Convention Center on 84th. That's all I really know about in Lincoln.

[hard heath]

I'm making several Yagi antennas now and I wouldn't want to walk anywhere carrying them.

[young kernel]

In reference to your node specifically, I assume it was the one you've posted about earlier, which I bet I could geoguess pretty accurately. It was only on the North deck that I was picking it up.

[narrow ledge]

Can y’all recommend a nice priced, decently performing directional antenna? Are there any panel patch style that might be a more discreet alternative to a yagi? I’m wondering if I could get focused on EBT from downtown if that would help fill in the mesh.

[quasi beacon]

I don't have any to recommend. Makes sense if you're outdoors a panel would blend in easier than a yagi. But if you could make an omni work, that might help link up the other downtown nodes since you're in a good central spot high up.

Are you doing something different with red x2 by the way? Got a 0 hop packet all the way to my home node.

[narrow ledge]

Red X2 is a T1000E temporarily placed in an advantageous spot. I’m not sure if it’s sustainable in that location. But I was eager to try it out. Please keep the reports coming.

I placed a node (BZYB) at my girlfriend’s place near Elnwood Park. It had been up for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t realize the TX power was really low for some testing. It’s back up to full power now. Watch for it and let me know if it’s working well in the mesh.

Is Zonk on here? I get direct trace routes every time with a good solid signal from BZYB.

[quasi beacon]

All packets are either coming through to my home node direct, or single hop. This is impressive because my home location isn't great, so I suspect it has a very solid connection to EBT. But strangely, I haven't been able to get a trace route on it. What are you seeing on your end?

But yeah, if you could get a discreet solar node up in the same spot, I bet it would be a game changer for downtown.

[quasi beacon]

Haven't seen this one yet. Will let you know if it pops up. Elmwood Park is sort of down in a valley if I remember right, might be tough to get out.

[tawdry compass]

Rokland has a couple that are OK. Depends on how much gain you are interested in.

[quasi beacon]

It seems like red x2 isn't receiving anything. It still isn't trace routing and it shows 0% channel util. But based on received signal here, it should at least be receiving from EBT and showing some channel util. Wonder if that trip through the washer/dryer killed the RX circuit?

[narrow ledge]

They are running in router mode and I wonder if the mesh would benefit if they switched to client. I can’t say I ever see Zonk in many other places.

[narrow ledge]

Ha ha! It’s different card. It’s placed very near some other telco gear so maybe its RX is overloaded and it can’t hear.

[quasi beacon]

Interesting... Keep us posted what you find on this.

[quasi beacon]

If there aren't many nodes in range, probably doesn't matter too much. Although I guess it could be a problem if there are other paths out that just aren't used because this one always steals the first hop.

Was that the only node in view for bzyb?

[narrow ledge]

BZYB claims to see a few in range over the past couple of hours.

[quasi beacon]

Cool, rare to see a spot in town that my home node reaches that EBT doesn't! AMC2 is 1 watt, so it seems to be a 1 way connection. I'm only seeing B740 from this list and it's not a good connection.

[hard heath]

I show a 1 hop connection to Red X2, strongest I've ever had for a DT node. But like AMC I can't get a traceroute to complete.

Can't see Zonk or BZYB unfortunately

[narrow ledge]

My access is limited, but I’ll keep trying for a better position to test. I think the receiver is deafened by nearby commercial RF gear.

[narrow ledge]

I made an adjustment. How does it look out there in Mesh Land?

[narrow ledge]

Look for REDX replacing FFX2.

[narrow ledge]

@hard heath Check it out!

[hard heath]

Got the 2016 ping! Tried to return it just now.

Not able to get a traceroute through, but it seems to be bridging a connection to my brother too

[narrow ledge]

Cool I got your ACK message at 2100

[remote zephyr]

i saw red X 25 mins ago 4 hops away

[hard heath]

Messages through to my brother in DT. Crazy how much improved it is!

[narrow ledge]

This gives me hope.

[quasi beacon]

I'm getting good traces to you through EBT! What did you change?

[narrow ledge]

I can’t really say much in the open. Check your DM. 😆

[narrow ledge]

A better placement of my T1000-E.

[hard heath]

I even got a traceroute through to his node. That's a first! Not sure what you changed but it helped a great deal. Great job for the T1000E. Makes me wonder what could be done with the higher gain antenna you mentioned.

[narrow ledge]

Awesome! It's so cool when it works

[narrow ledge]

So I’m hearing some feedback from folks trying to find us on Discord. Honestly, I had some issues, too. Seems something changed when the server folks changed the way local channels work. Is there a known to be working link that could be advertised in the public mesh chat?

[twin fern]

https://discord.com/channels/867578229534359593/1217697721285218314 I think that'll work?

ugh. Thanks discord.

https://discord.com/channels/867578229534359593/1217697721285218314

[hard heath]

I had problems too. It's downright buried in the main Mesh Discord and not at all intuitive to folks unfamiliar with Discord to begin with

[quasi beacon]

This one works for me, will send it over the mesh again.

[tawdry compass]

I would suggest we move back to the Nebraska midwest mesh discord. Or, even better, have our own server on discord like Austin and Chicago and others.

[rustic sphinx]

I sent my Father-in-Law a RAK Wismesh Pocket for Christmas. I guess those don't come with Wifi? He put it out in his antenna box outside and wanted to connect it to wifi for remote access. Network section only has Ethernet option. Anyone have advise on how he can access the outside unit remotely with only 1 node?

https://store.rokland.com/products/wismesh-pocket?srsltid=AfmBOooPW4FkDS3liAoA95ZBdnCUH_KifFVH73toSsTva9fl3w9DsrGW

[hard heath]

Not sure how simple it would be to add wifi since it's already in a case. You can add a wifi module to the rak board, but then it won't fit.

[quasi beacon]

Rak has an ipex connector for an external ble antenna. The range is surprisingly good compared to devices with a built in antenna.

[hard heath]

I've been really surprised at the range for the RAK's BT

The RAK Wismesh Pocket is such a cool device though.. honestly if I were in this position I would put a smaller, more cost-effective device in the antenna box and carry the Pocket. Either a purpose-built higher power node or maybe something else with wifi built-in like a Heltec WS lite.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah good call. Would be a shame to run that sweet case inside an enclosure like that. 😂

[outer delta]

I am now. Needed the link to the server first, then the channel link worked like a charm.

Names Andy. No need to be to formal. Heathen has been my call sign since military, kinda like an old pair of boots, comfortable.

[narrow ledge]

Welcome! I’m glad you found us! We’ve chatted over the air. I run some nodes in downtown Omaha.

[hard heath]

Glad you're here!

Anyone get any new hardware for the holidays?

[narrow ledge]

I got a Station G2 on the way and some new digikey antennas to try arriving soon.

[hard heath]

Nice! I need to make another Ebyte node from some parts hanging around here and put a bigger yagi together. I made a moxon antenna a while back with awful results so here's hoping a yagi attempt isn't just a frightening wall hanger.

[narrow ledge]

Speaking of antennas, I just broke off the little coil BT/WiFi antenna on a Heltec V3. I’ve read that I can just solder a 3cm wire in its place. I just don’t trust my small parts soldering skills. 😆

[hard heath]

I always think I have steady hands until I need to solder on circuit boards.

[outer delta]

For a general description, CWE looks like this. With a few changes. 9db 48" ant, 10000 mah flat battery. Currently 30' up a pole but I think it needs to be higher. What should I change? This is my first one built and I have a 2nd ready to assemble.
https://youtu.be/_h3UluaqfTw?si=j6_wQzKIkNEHo4DV

[tacit schooner]

was browsing around at some rc stuff and found this: https://www.radiomasterrc.com/products/bandit-nano-expresslrs-rf-module

If you scroll almost all the way down, youll see its compatible with meshtastic

never thought id find this just randomly looking at RC electronics lol

[outer delta]

Ohh drone nodes...

[narrow ledge]

Looks great, Heathen! Is it on full-time? There are periods where I don’t see it from my DTOMA nodes, and I would expect to since we are practically neighbors.

It’s been a little under two full days since I put REDX (T1000-E) in an advantageous outdoor spot, and the battery is still about 40%. Now I’m wondering how long it might last if I connected it to a simple, discreet USB battery, maybe 5000 or more mAh? Maybe 5 days? A week? Two. Sounds like something fun to test.

I think REDX is still doing decent job of connecting DTOMA to the rest of the metro mesh via EBT. Y’all keep the reports coming.

[remote zephyr]

Yeah i see RedX now 2 hops away

[narrow ledge]

Awesome! I just ordered two more T1000-E units. Damn things are addictive.

[remote zephyr]

nice 🙂

[outer delta]

It was on this morning at about 8am, but yes it's always on.

[quasi beacon]

Random thought... I just tested a dinky 5v solar panel on a T1000. Shining a bright flashlight on the panel indoors was enough to turn the t1000 on a keep it in charging mode. This was with only 10-20ma of current.

[hard heath]

I have a similar antenna on PHHM and have had good luck, though it's mounted in my attic. It's also on a higher powered node though. 160mW just doesn't cut it for me out here.

[quasi beacon]

The panel is rated for 150ish ma in full sun. Might be enough to keep it going when the sun is shining.

[hard heath]

Looks like the perfect size for the T1000E

[quasi beacon]

Welcome Andy! We chatted when I was in CB a week ago. It seems your CWE node should be performing much better than we're seeing. What nodes are you seeing zero hops to?

[narrow ledge]

I’ll see if I can find something like that that regulates to 5VDC. But I might have a couple of buck converters around that I used for a bike generator hub project.

[quasi beacon]

Here's another one that could work. It's not regulated but that cuts down on the overhead. 2 watts with a glass panel

The challenge with t1000 is the small battery. Even with a huge solar panel, weeks like this with 4 days without any sun are tough. That's where your idea about using a USB power bank is interesting.

[hard heath]

I've been making these

6000-7000mah regulated 5V. Would charge off solar too if need be

[outer delta]

I think it needs more altitude.

[hard heath]

I only very sparingly pick up CWE out at PHHM. Never can get a traceroute through

[outer delta]

Here is what I see 0hop from CWE

[narrow ledge]

I just got a traceroute to HTN3, but I haven’t seen CWE for hours.

[outer delta]

Odd. This is htn3

Maybe I need to put that up the pole

[narrow ledge]

I don’t know the Android app, but do those time figures mean it’s been 5 hours since you’ve seen REDX?

[narrow ledge]

And 27 hours since you’ve heard FA16?

[narrow ledge]

I do so something similar with some cheap batteries from Amazon. They aren’t picky about current and can charge and discharge at the same time. I get them so I can charge batteries off my bike hub where the current can vary quite a bit and is generally low.

[outer delta]

I bet it's some of the settings need changed. I flashed it, set it to US 900mhz and router-mute. Everything else is default.
Any suggestions?

[narrow ledge]

Could you try regular client mode for a while? General consensus is that router mode is best used on nodes with a significant elevation based coverage, like a mountaintop or communications tower. Otherwise it might be consuming hops that might otherwise be better served by other nodes.

I see HTN3 frequently and that might be inside your house. I’m certain something up on that pole should perform really well.

[hard heath]

These are just cheap 5V UPS boards from overseas with 18650 holders attached. They can be stacked too for more capacity. I use this one in my car (PHAU) paired with a 1 watt node so it charges while driving. I only leave PHAU on while I'm at work and haven't charged it in two weeks.

[hard heath]

I know I'm a broken record on this, but I really wish mesh hardware wasn't almost always limited to the 160mW figure. Only the G2 and custom builds will get you up to the 1000mW hard limit (and beyond). It makes for a one sided node at times, but more and more higher powered units are popping up around Omaha

[quasi beacon]

Yeah there's something off here. In that location you should be picking up most of the Omaha traffic via EBT. And for sure should be seeing regular updates from red and FA16. Is the node at the top of the pole? How much of a hassle would it be to pull down and look everything over? Also agree with Scott to stick with client role for now.

Also odd that it's not getting regular updates from the heathen node. That's at the same location right? I assume both have been running in the 42 hours since it updated last?

[narrow ledge]

CWE looking good so far!

I’m headed to CB south downtown later. I’ll have a T1000E and see how things look there. Hoping to see REDX and CWE.

[quasi beacon]

Man, the complete lack of sunshine this week is doing a number on EBT. It should be able to run about 3 weeks with no solar on baseline consumption, but with all the extra TX time (where the amp draws 10x the power of the Rak) in router mode, consumption is about 3x baseline. At this rate, it will go down sometime this weekend or early next week.

[twin fern]

Not very far into Kansas, basically straight south of GI. Didn't expect to see anything down here

[quasi beacon]

Those are Omaha nodes! Must have hopped from a plane flying overhead.

[twin fern]

Oh! That's super cool

[quasi beacon]

I was in Southeast Lincoln today. Picked up OC fecc and mesh 7918.

[tawdry compass]

Welcome to the G2 brethren. 😎

[tawdry compass]

Overpaneling is my mantra. 😄

Whatever you think you need for panels, just double it, within reason and requirements, and of course within the limits of your charge controller.

[quasi beacon]

I figured you'd chime in. 😂 There might have been an errant voltage reading this morning. Had a few hours of sun today and back to normal levels.

But yeah, battery sizing in the Midwest is so important. I'd say the same thing as with paneling... Whatever you think you need, double it. Need to be able to survive a week or more of snow cover.

[tawdry compass]

Yeah, I was down to 93% on the solar testbed. Back to 100% today.😄

[tacit schooner]

My crude/temp helium on my G2

[tawdry compass]

HOA?

[tacit schooner]

No, thankfully. Just need time to mount it on my roof and run the cable through the attic

[tawdry compass]

Ahh, OK. Best luck

You can also use a window passthrough.

[quasi beacon]

I'm sure you'll address this with the permanent mounting, but make sure the radiating portion of the antenna clears the pipe completely. Don't want metal anywhere other than next to the metal base of the antenna for mounting.

[tacit schooner]

For the permanent install I will definitely, im limited by ceiling height at the moment

[narrow ledge]

What a feed line! 😆

[tacit schooner]

It might be a little short for the current application 🤔

[outer delta]

I switched it to client mode.
Also on the lookout for an antenna tower, 50ft ish. If you happen to see a use one on offer, pls let me know.

[quasi beacon]

Did you figure out if there was something wrong with the setup on CWE? Still only seems to be online sporadically.

[narrow ledge]

I don’t see CWE as consistently as I would expect, especially being so close.

[hard heath]

I didn't pick it up at all when I was downtown this afternoon

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, I don't think height is the problem. 30ft should be plenty to have a solid link to EBT and the red nodes.

[outer delta]

I didn't see any problems, it's working as I would expect. Is it still not available in client mode?
Could it be the buildings in downtown blocking?

[quasi beacon]

Do you have a fairly clear view straight south? Are you seeing EBTs updates, if so, what is the signal strength? When I was in CB I had a node in the parking lot at the Iowa west fieldhouse and it was picking up everything from EBT. I would have expected your location just north of there to be similar (or even better given the pole mount.)

And sorry if this is coming across as us pestering you. 😂 Certainly don't mean it that way.

[distant kettle]

What the heck. I'm seeing nodes in Manhattan, KS. I thought it was maybe a bounce off of a plane but BHR was received direct.

There was a plane node in the area a bit ago but I've been seeing distant nodes for the past hour and BHR definitely came in direct a couple of times. What the heck is going on lol

[quasi beacon]

Wow! Tropo... Something something... Bounce... Something something. ? 😂

[distant kettle]

That's about where I'm at in my analysis lmao

[quasi beacon]

Ok, theory... Maybe the radio signal from BHR literally bounced off the plane and reflected out this way? 😂

The plane was probably in that general area based on bdcb location timing vs 3264 timing (flying east)

[elder plover]

Morning guys! I'm over in Missouri and we had an airplane at 10:30-10:50 last night and then another this morning around 7:35-7:50. Added around 50 nodes between the two between St Louis and Kansas City.

DId you guys catch the "JFK to LAS" last night?

[quasi beacon]

Good morning! I didn't see the flight last night, but we definitely noticed the one this morning. What's your approximate location?

[elder plover]

Jefferson City, Missouri

I have family roots in Norfolk, Wayne, Laurel - not much meshing up there yet that I've stumbled into

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, not much outside of the Omaha metro that we've seen. Omaha has 100+ nodes and usually ~60 online at any given time.

[elder plover]

That's impressive and nice work!!

[quasi beacon]

I used to go to Jeff City regularly for work. Nice area, how's the mesh out there?

[hard heath]

I've got family up in Norfolk as well and I've never seen another node up there or even when driving up that way

[distant kettle]

The plane nodes never bounce in anything from that area either whereas I see stuff from KS, MO, and occasionally SD all the time. There's a couple out in Seward that I see occasionally but really not much else in the state from what I can tell

[quasi beacon]

I'll be on a plane to STL late this afternoon. Will see what else pops up. I'll probably keep it on mute though.

[tacit schooner]

any tested or running reticulum/r nodes? i remember chatting about it before but curious if anyone is running it currently

[narrow ledge]

Here's TR up in the sky, kiteborn.

[quasi beacon]

That's so cool!!! Any estimate on altitude? And how long will it stay in the air?

Maybe a dumb question, I guess it's totally dependent on the wind. 😂

[narrow ledge]

TR says maybe 300 ft up. He said he might stay until 1630

Weeks ago I set up a node at my GF's place that has never checked into the larger mesh. Just got it with 2 hops.

[crude cedar]

Hey, I'm the one near Seward with a node taped to the inside of a window! At some point I want to get the thing outside and up on a mast of some sort. (There's a grain elevator nearby that would be an AMAZING mounting spot but I'm not sure I could convince them to let me put it up there.)

I bought a couple different nodes to play a few months ago but haven't had the time or energy lately to do much with them.

[quasi beacon]

Im stuck in the airport with no connection to the mesh at the moment. Would have loved to check this out from the home node.

[quasi beacon]

Welcome! There are a few nodes in Lincoln, you might be able to reach them from the top of a grain elevator.

[crude cedar]

Yeah, one of those in Lincoln is me as well, at work, haha! My ultimate goal would be to make it from home to work with a hop or two on grain elevators along the way. I think it would be feasible if I can get permission and can put together a reliable enough solar setup that I wouldn't have to service often.

[quasi beacon]

I just got TR direct from inside the airport terminal!! Hopped my home node too!

[narrow ledge]

I got TR from FA16 at -5.0dB
!433f1d9c

Route traced towards destination:
!433d3634 --> !433f1d9c (?dB)
Route traced back to us:
!433f1d9c --> !433d3634 (-5.0dB)

[narrow ledge]

Tony says he's bringing the kite down for a landing. That was a cool experiment.

[narrow ledge]

TR on a kite. AT on a plane. What’s next? Who’s going to space?

[elder plover]

@quasi beacon I just heard from one of our guys he caught you coming into STL

[young kernel]

I did not pick up AMC T1000, but I heard 3b33 at 4:41pm "10k ft above Oakland IA". Any plane-to-plane contacts, @quasi beacon?

[narrow ledge]

@hard heath and others: I made some changes to FFX2 up on the roof. If you’ve previously noticed that you could hear my nodes, but not traveroute to or through them, would you please try again? My theory is that my node was deafened by RF around it and couldn’t hear well. I’ve tried to mitigate that a bit.

[tacit schooner]

Is this dumb? Will it hurt performance?

[hard heath]

Last saw FFX2 an hour ago and Farnam 16 about 25 minutes ago. Can't traceroute either, nor get updated position or user info

Direct connections to your node are very, very rare for me though. 99% of the time they go through EBT or AGOV

[quasi beacon]

Not that I know of... But I was also running client mute to avoid the constant rebroadcasting. I did pick up Bennington hilltop from 330km out.

[quasi beacon]

Cool! Yeah Dave DMd me and I mentioned you had stopped into our discord.

[elder plover]

You guys have a great New Years!! See everyone in 2025!

[quasi beacon]

Sharing an antenna with a splitter? Probably wouldn't hurt anything for RX only but I wouldn't want to risk potentially sending 1watt right into the other receiver.

What's the use case you're going for with two nodes?

[quasi beacon]

Lol, I literally had this thought on the plane.

[quasi beacon]

Thanks, you too!!

[tawdry compass]

anyone have any experience with Reticulum?

[lament perch]

No, but I've toying with the idea of flashing RNode onto one of my boards. I'm currious about Reticulum.

[tacit schooner]

I’ve been looking into it and the apps a bit more, might flash my heltech on it

[hard heath]

Could be fun to play with. I've got a couple spare nodes I could flash.

[tawdry compass]

Yeah, it does sound interesting, just checking to see of anyone had any knowledge. Sounds like our regular lora hardware will work?

[tacit schooner]

I just flashed my spare heltech with it running on mesh chat. Was kinda a pain but once I switched to Linux it was a breeze.

I kinda had to guess on the frequency specs, but it’s been running for a while now. Haven’t seen any others at this time but excited to test it out

[lament perch]

What frequency settings did you use?

[tacit schooner]

I’ll be home soon and shoot over a screenshot, I don’t remember off the top of my head

[tacit schooner]

again, i was not sure what to use so i kinda just went for it. if there are better settings to use that make more sense, please let me know

[lament perch]

OK, I'm set the same and Announcing every 15 mins.

[lament perch]

I'd be interested in changing spread factor and bandwidth to match the Meshtastic presets for Long_Fast
https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/#915-mhz-ism-band:~:text=Long Range / Fast,153dB

Bandwidth --> 250 kHz
Spreading Factor --> 11

[hard heath]

Hoping to give this a shot later tonight or maybe this weekend. 915MHz works for me. Or anything really, so long as we stay well clear of the slot 20 channel (906.875MHz) used by Meshtastic in Omaha.

I had a bunch of aluminum and wound up cutting elements for 4 Yagi antennas. Need to wire up the driven elements yet though.

I also spent some time measuring and analyzing the AliExpress '915MHz' '7dBi' Yagi antenna. The folded dipole is passable and tests around 1.6 SWR. The rest is a big pile of clown shoes. Elements and boom are too large for the frequency. Spacing is seemingly random, and the parasitic elements are the exact same length. Reflector element is far too long. Even the folded dipole itself is too thick for the frequency.

I was using it on PhotonYagi and will never be using it again.

[tacit schooner]

i went ahead and made those changes, i wasnt seeing any announcements before though

[lament perch]

ok, I updated my config too.

[hard heath]

Testing small Yagi build.

[quasi beacon]

Damn, that's the lowest swr I've ever seen. Nice work! Any idea what the gain would be with this design?

[hard heath]

I was pretty excited when I saw it but of course now I can't repeat it. Seems stable-ish around 1.2-1.3. This is the smaller one and should be good for 12dBi

I drew it up to be somewhat modular though. You can decrease the gain and widen the beam by sliding elements off the far end. They're all on tracks in the extruded boom so they can be slid around for tuning as needed.

[hard heath]

Done with these four. Now for testing. Smaller ones are 16" and should be 12dBi. Larger are about 37" and should be 15dBi.

[tawdry compass]

Remember, the higher the gain, the narrower the beam. Wow, Photon, Yagi's gone wild! Good work.

[hard heath]

Yep. I think the bigger ones might be more suited to line of sight and I might not use them until after I move. The beam on them should be 34x35.6 degrees. The little ones are a bit wider at 44.1x47.6 degrees.

[narrow ledge]

I just put up FFX1 downtown in an advantageous location, similar to before, but this time with a 3000 mAh battery. Let’s see how long it can run like this in the cold. It’s transmitting the temperature, so this weekend should be a good test of that.

[quasi beacon]

Nice! Looking forward to seeing how this goes!

[quasi beacon]

I'm curious, have you tested the battery bank when the t1000 is fully charged? A lot of these will shut off automatically with the low power draw from a rak.

[young kernel]

Awesome builds! Did you use a hairpin? I've been experimenting and can get a decent dipole going but can't figure out impedance matching once the other elements are in place.

[narrow ledge]

Not specifically. But I did have a USB power meter connected to it as I was testing the battery through charge and discharge cycles. I left the meter connected, but with no load, and was surprised when I looked at it later and the meter was dutifully showing voltage but with no current. I would have expected the battery to shut off.

[jaunty flower]

👋

[narrow ledge]

Hey Zonk! Glad to see you here.

[hard heath]

Not on the small ones but I've got one drawn up for the bigger ones. Lots of testing left to do!

[narrow ledge]

Working on a little something. Just need to drill some holes and get it in a nice spot.

[hard heath]

Nice!!

[narrow ledge]

This is up on the roof now, plugged into AC power. I still need to tweak the attachment, but I’m hoping it’s done. I could try other SMA antennas. Look for DT16 and see if it’s helping the mesh at all.

[quasi beacon]

Nice! Anxious to see how it performs.

[narrow ledge]

Please try some trace routes and report back what you see. I see some of my outbound traceries going through it on through EBT.

[quasi beacon]

Will do. I'll be back at the house late tonight.

[hard heath]

I pick it up about once an hour or so, or that's what it looks like from here. Same with Farnam 16 and CWE. Can't get traceroutes through though.

[remote zephyr]

I see both Red X1 & Farnam 16 in the last 5 mins, both 3 hops away but traceroute didn't work

[remote zephyr]

oh this is cool, there's an option in meshsense to add to there global map https://meshsense.affirmatech.com/ so i turned that on and it's slowly filling out omaha

[narrow ledge]

I’ll try it.

[young kernel]

Cool! I also heard the 0008 plane node a bit ago from Lincoln when they were over Le Mars, IA. 1 hopped me a Sioux City node, EBT, and a few more without position.

[remote zephyr]

Sweet

[narrow ledge]

It’s always fun when the planes fly over. Makes me want to book a trip somewhere. 🤣

@hard heath; I haven’t seen your brother’s downtown node for a few days. Hope all is well there.

[hard heath]

Yeah I had him bring it by a few days ago so I could run it through a couple things. I sent it back with him today along with a smaller Yagi. The plan is to try aiming it towards EBT or to you. I don't think he's had time to set it up again though.

Has anyone tried ferrite clamps on their coax? Wondering if some type 61 would help cut down on RFI or if it wouldn't be worth it for LoRa.

[distant kettle]

I have that same Linx antenna and it turns out to have pretty disappointing SWR. I was expecting it to be better than the no-name China stuff on Amazon, but the popular Tenmory antenna on there is better

SWR on that Linx is 2.2 at best and tends to vary a lot with proximity to other objects etc

It's also best around 918MHz whereas the Tenmory one is best at 908MHz pretty much exactly where the default Meshtastic freq slot is

https://a.co/d/2noz4KH

[narrow ledge]

I’ve got this DIY Mall one from Amazon. It looks the same. I wonder if it is. I should get an analyzer so I can test (or build) individual units.

I’ll try it later in the node and see if it helps.

https://amzn.to/4h2LthV

[tawdry compass]

I use ferrite clamps on merlin's window pass thru coax. And anything else that needs it. I keep a big box handy. They are cheap.

[hard heath]

What material did you get? Seems like type 61 is best for mitigating RFI from 200-2000MHz.

Trying to sort out antennas. My smaller Yagi antennas test great with low SWR and good impedance, but might benefit from ferrite clamps for RFI. The bigger ones are a different story. SWR is okay but impedance is a bit low. I'll go the hairpin route for them and try to sort that out. Wondering if I should be making 1:1 baluns for all of them though given the dipole driven elements

[quasi beacon]

None of the trace or position requests from my home node are going through. I do see somewhat regular updates from DT16 in the metrics log but it looks like there are stretches where those aren't making it out. So I suspect the the connection to EBT is marginal. Do you have access to wifi up there in order to monitor the node directly without sitting out in the cold? 🥶

[remote zephyr]

I left mesh sense running all night and it filled in https://meshsense.affirmatech.com/ with trace routes including to the downtown nodes

[quasi beacon]

I have mixed feelings on this tool. It's cool to see all the connections on the map. But it doesn't provide any indication of connection reliability. If meshsense requests a trace 20 times for a node before 1 goes through, it still shows up the same on the map as a connection that goes through every time. As an example, it's interesting that gtfn shows direct connections to both redh and redx, but not DT16. @narrow ledge are you seeing gtfn direct on any of your nodes?

[quasi beacon]

Also, I've only played with this a couple times in the past. Do you have a sense for how often trace routes are requested for nodes that are already on the map? Curious how much extra traffic these traces are adding to the mesh.

[remote zephyr]

Yeah it does seem to add quite a bit of extra traffic

[narrow ledge]

I’ve got REDX with me and don’t show GTFN in my node list.

Or RED3

[jaunty flower]

heltec v3 users of the group, i couldnt find a case i liked, so i designed my own: https://www.printables.com/model/1115493-heltec-v3-w-4000mah-case-stock-sma-antennas-case-w

[distant kettle]

I can get traceroutes to DT16 but not consistently

when it does work, the return path is often direct

[distant kettle]

IIRC, when you first start it up, it sends traceroutes about as fast as it can, but once it has attempted traceroutes to every node once, there is some considerable delay before it traceroutes a node again

I forget what the default is but it's a couple hours or so iirc

there's a setting that governs that

[narrow ledge]

When you said it was in a tree, you meant it was in a tree. 😹

[jaunty flower]

yup. i wasnt kidding. years of POTA experience has trained me for this. haha

[narrow ledge]

Is there an external battery attached?

[jaunty flower]

yup. 4000mah

the omaha mesh needs a mobile tower. someone should get this. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/875062338163342/

[remote zephyr]

I saw that, that would be useful for a lot of radio fun

[quasi beacon]

Well shit... EBT just had a fatal error and will be down for awhile. This is the same issue that happened a week after it was initially installed where it just froze up and became completely unresponsive via BT/Lora/USB. At this point I think it's a firmware issue from early 2.5.x. Sorry guys, it's just too damn cold to climb the tree for another board swap right now.

Here's a bit more detail on the issue from when it happened a second time with the original board... #nrf52 message

I'll need to thoroughly stress test 2.5.15 before putting it back in the tree again. I think it was running 2.5.4 or 2.5.5 when it crashed. Left bluetooth connected from inside the house for about an hour and came back to it "sleeping".

[quasi beacon]

Yeah I was seeing the same from EBT today before it crashed. Some crazy routes out but direct on the way back. @narrow ledge I think it goes back to your theory about RF interference in that location negatively impacting RX performance. The SNR numbers from DT16 to EBT were ok and the RSSI was solid.

[distant kettle]

This looks like the issue that they recently reduced the node limit on nrf52 to try and fix

[quasi beacon]

Weird... why would being connected via bluetooth trigger that I wonder?

[quasi beacon]

Ok I think this is definitely it, thanks for the tip. Found some other references to it as well. It seems to be something related to connecting/disconnecting/reconnecting to the app with a maxed out node list. This might also explain some issues I've seen where the node name or some other config parameters have randomly disappeared on a reboot (or BLE reconnect.)

[quasi beacon]

Nice! I love the concept of a temporary tree branch install like this. Do you just leave enough paracord tied off at the ground to lower it for a recharge or battery swap every day or 2?

[quasi beacon]

Why do I want this thing so badly?? 😂

[quasi beacon]

Already missing EBT... looks like 50% of my roof node connections and 80% of my t1000 connections were coming from it previously. 😢

[narrow ledge]

Still running as if it’s plugged in.

[jaunty flower]

Thanks! When I had it up, I was swapping batteries. But unfortunately it didn't do any better than an attic install. So I took down and just run the node in the attic on permanent power.

[narrow ledge]

FFX1 was placed in a discreet advantageous spot on 1/3 with a 3000 mah battery connected. It’s still reporting that it’s plugged in. But it was off for several hours overnight and came back online with a reset uptime this morning. I suspect the single digit temps were too much for it. Now it’s showing abnormally warm temps. I’m wondering if the sensor is confused or maybe the device needs a reboot.

[quasi beacon]

The Seeed spec mentions min charging temp at 0c (32f) and min operating temp of -20c (-4f.) So maybe it stopped charging from the battery bank and ran down its internal battery. Is it facing south? might have picked up a decent amount of solar heat during the day today. EBT was charging at full blast for the first time in a awhile when it bit the dust today.

[narrow ledge]

I’m pretty sure it reported plugged in up until it disappeared. But plausible theory. I’ll keep my eye on the metrics.

[narrow ledge]

I swapped the antenna on DT16 with this one just now. An informal A/B, 6 iteration test semantically that it’s hearing a little better. Maybe it’ll get more completed traces now.

[quasi beacon]

EBT will be down till later this week, maybe longer. @distant kettle are you getting DT16 updates 0 hop regularly?

[hard heath]

Very interesting. I had a Seeed Xiao BLE (nrf chip) running on PHAU on and off for a month or so and it was lasting several days on the battery I made. Tried to test it overnight last week and the NRF was locked up. Still can't get it to work even after using the firmware wipe uf2 file. I just switched over to an ESP32 board for now as I'm fed up messing with it.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, for me it took a couple tries with the wipe uf2 for it to go.

[hard heath]

I'll keep playing with it later and see if I can't get it to play nicely again. ESP32 board just eats battery so much faster.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah it's nuts. The devices I've measured before average about 8x the power consumption of a nrf.

[hard heath]

I'm lucky to get 30 hours out of a 1 watt ESP32 build and a 26wH power pack. Thing is just insatiable.

[narrow ledge]

The EBT outage is really demonstrating how it’s really the link to joining downtown nodes to the rest of the metro mesh. Here’s what one of my client_mute nodes looks like a while after resetting the node DB.

I’m seeing a few more, but I haven’t received position reports for them. Some are showing multi hops. I’m wondering how they are getting to me.

[tawdry compass]

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09SWNPY2Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8

[tawdry compass]

Going on like 3 weeks+ with my photon special hooked to the 50ah self heated LifeP04 solar rig.

[hard heath]

That's a bit bigger battery than I've got hanging around here 😂

[distant kettle]

Not regularly. Sometimes it's 0 hops, sometimes it's unreachable

@quasi beacon So here's an idea to make EBT more maintainable without having to climb the tree as much.

Get something like one of those 433MHz transmitter + receiver modules. Something like this: https://a.co/d/934ivjX

Install a Raspberry Pi Zero W in the box with EBT. I'm assuming you can probably hit the Wi-Fi in the house from up there, or set it up in access point mode and connect with your phone from the bottom of the tree.

Wire the remote receiver to the reset input on the RAK module, and to the power-on button on the Raspi.

Raspi is connected to the RAK via USB or serial.

Now you can reset the RAK with the 433mhz receiver, and if that isn't enough to fix a problem, you can boot up the Raspi and SSH in and use it to reflash the RAK or whatever you need to do. Shut it down when you're done to save battery

BTW, my RAK running 2.5.18 crashed yesterday and corrupted the nodedb, so there's some kind of issue in that version too. Hopefully it's just something wrong in the alpha and doesn't exist in the latest stable release

I didn't bother diagnosing the issue but if it happens again I will pull logs over serial and dump the flash filesystem to investigate

actually, I'm not sure if raspi zero w has a signal you can assert for power on, but it could also just be powered through a relay with the receiver set up for toggle operation

or a mosfet, or whatever

[quasi beacon]

Yeah that's an interesting thought. The pi would require more power than my current solar/LTO setup could support though. Would probably need to steal the POE from the helium setup

[distant kettle]

pi zero W has pretty low current requirements, and I'm assuming it would just be off when not using it

[quasi beacon]

oh I gotcha. Will think on it. In the meantime, need to reflash my spare rak board and get it ready to swap. Fingers crossed for some warmer weather later in the week or this weekend.

yeah the crazy thing is, if I hadn't been screwing with the bluetooth connection today I'm sure it would have kept running. It never needed any maintenance aside from the last time it crashed like this.

@distant kettle by the way what are you seeing for an online count currently? My home node was at 60+ this morning, now 33 at the moment. Also curious what the west O folks are seeing. You might be the only connection to the downtown nodes for now.

[distant kettle]

I show 54 of 80 online

[quasi beacon]

Nice, you must be getting most of the same connections as EBT then. Unfortunately my signal to you is marginal.

[quasi beacon]

Could be worse I guess. In the early days I was happy to get a connection like that to someone. 😂

[distant kettle]

I need to get this sucker up on the roof one of these days

agv3 is definitely relaying a lot of packets today. switched it from CLIENT_MUTE to CLIENT after EBT went down

[quasi beacon]

I'm a bit disappointed the home node isn't performing better after relocating it to the roof with a better antenna rather than running through 30 ft of coax. I'm curious, do you see my T1000 node? Sometimes it picks up almost as much as the home node if I have it upstairs near the window.

[distant kettle]

I see it. It's usually hopped through AMCH but occasionally direct

For whatever reason I can see most of Red's downtown nodes fairly reliably except DT16 which is very intermittent

Also, the path from downtown to me is in general better than the path from me to downtown

Lots of stuff where the traceroute takes a goofy route to get out there but the reply comes back direct. Probably from the poor RF environment downtown

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, I was seeing the same today when I was connected to EBT on the app. I still think a solid setup in Council Bluffs would be the easiest link to downtown. I bet your node has decent coverage in CB as well.

[distant kettle]

Yeah, it's mostly just trees between me and south-central CB

I have a fairly clear shot across Manawa

Someone needs to sneak up to the top of the Desert Dome and get a node up there ;p

[hard heath]

44 online now, which is a bit lower than usual. I see intermittent connections to Red's nodes DT but haven't been able to traceroute any of them.

[tawdry compass]

I'll swing Merlin's yagi to due East. Maybe that will help, if only a little.

[distant kettle]

traceroute is super unreliable in a client-dense, router-poor environment, I think

[distant kettle]

Another idea just came to me. Just run a USB cable down the tree :p Might need an active repeater-type USB cable to cover the distance. Just wrap the end up somehow when you're not using it for a degree of weatherproofing.

I think that the USB method of kicking the device into DFU mode should work even when Meshtastic is crashed.

[narrow ledge]

In the spring I might be able to put up a node at the sailing club at Manawa. I installed a WiFi access point and webcam there last year and there may be space to co-locate Meshtastic. But there are trees around. Maybe it can punch though.

[distant kettle]

oops, that was supposed to be in reply to @quasi beacon

[distant kettle]

915MHz doesn't mind trees too much. It does depend a bit on the amount of foliage on the trees and the amount of water in and on them, so you would see some seasonal/weather based variation there

But I would be surprised if you can't zero-hop EBT at least from a Manawa area rooftop

2.4ghz has trouble with trees and 5ghz will bounce right off them, but ~915 is still low enough to cut right through them fairly well

[narrow ledge]

I might be able to go out there with a temporary set up and see how it looks. The T1000E is great for that.

[distant kettle]

Oh great. agv3 crashed again. ugh. I'll go mess with it

think I'll revert back from alpha firmware to beta and hope that was the problem

[distant kettle]

ok, wiped and back to 2.5.15. Never had any issues for weeks until I bumped it to 2.5.18, so hopefully it's just something broken in there. Same symptoms this time as the other day -- comes back up after a reset, but the nodedb is screwed up in a way where it can't save anything in there at all and it loses the node name configuration (which is technically also stored in nodedb, just preserved if you do a normal nodedb reset)

[quasi beacon]

The benefits of not having a roof/tree mounted node. 😂 Great idea hanging a long USB cable down from the tree by the way!

[hard heath]

And here I am too lazy to climb into my own attic for an update.. Really glad I don't have to climb up a tree.

[distant kettle]

I think the issue I'm seeing is different from the one EBT ran into in some way, because it comes back on after hitting reset and mostly works, it's just in a weird state where nodedb is broken, the node name returns to default, and attempts to change the node name don't take

[distant kettle]

It is possible that my problem relates to trying to operate it on garden variety LiIon cells in below freezing temps... which I thought might end up being a problem but I was hoping it would magically be fine :p

[distant kettle]

might have to move the damn thing inside for now until I can upgrade to a slightly less garbage power solution

[quasi beacon]

Are they protected cells? I don't think the rak has any sort of low temp cutoff.

[distant kettle]

they're protected. my thinking is that current draw transients might be causing micro-brownouts that screw up flash writes, because common liion chemistries can have some issues like that in super cold temps. Not sure though. Have some experimenting to do to figure this out, but I'm kinda hoping it was just a 2.5.18 issue. That node was fine for weeks and then it started having problems a few days after going to 2.5.18. We'll see.

Definitely doesn't seem like the same LFS issue others are having, since it boots up with just a reset but the nodedb alone is corrupted

FWIW, I couldn't get USB serial to come up while it was in the crashed state, so I may be completely wrong about that being a solution for recovering from the crash you've been seeing

I thought USB serial was an independent peripheral inside the nrf52 that can run when the core is hung but I guess I was wrong

[hard heath]

Just basic cells in my car node's battery too. Seems to be okay so far in the cold but we'll see how far that goes.

Hoping to get one of my Frankenstein antennas in the attic again soon with PHYG and see if I can't help bridge the east/west connection between me and AGOV.

I spent a while last night playing with that Seeed Xiao NRF52 board with no luck. Seems to flash but remains unresponsive afterwards.

[tacit schooner]

Using my ultra g2 and an environment sensor to calibrate my ecobee thermostat.

Turns out my ecobee was showing about 20% higher than my ultra g2

[distant kettle]

so, agv3 died twice in the same strange way within about 72 hrs of being on 2.5.18 after weeks of working flawlessly on every alpha release from 2.5.14 through 2.5.17, so I'm thinking maybe it was a firmware issue after all. It's been on 2.5.15 since yesterday and has been fine so far.

That battery pack is 2 high current 18650s in parallel, always sits between 4.1 - 4.2v, and is charged at a slow enough rate that I doubt it is being damaged appreciably by the cold charging dendrite phenomenon, and I didn't see any problems in the extreme cold last night, so I'm back to thinking it was a firmware bug I tripped over and my janky power setup is just fine

I am going to let it sit on 2.5.15 for a week or so then bump it back up to 2.5.18 or newer and see what happens. If the issue recurs then, I will go dig through commits and see if I can figure out what got broken. They keep messing around with how flash management works on nrf52 to fix another bug, while concurrently messing with some of the logic for handling the nodedb, so it wouldn't shock me if something just got broken in bleeding edge firmware

My hunch is that everything up to 2.5.17 is fine and it was something between .17 and .18 that broke if indeed it is a firmware bug

[distant kettle]

FYI agv3 can usually hear PHHM direct, but the return path from me to PHHM is usually indirect, probably because you have more tx power to work with

Still seeing the thing where I can hear DT16 most of the time, but it can't hear me very often. Think it has a hard time receiving through the clutter up there

planning to get my hands on one of those EBYTE boards and build a node with 1W TX a la Photon

[hard heath]

Nice! I've built six of them so far and they seem to work pretty well, though they're pretty power hungry. EBYTE has 1W and 2W boards (30S and 33S).

[hard heath]

I actually haven't been able to see any nodes in Bellevue since EBT went down. I can see some downtown nodes but only intermittently.

[quick sage]

finally got my Solar unit (STFN) together mostly. I was waiting for some 2mm screws and nuts (so tiny compared to 3mm). I did have it charging yesterday for a bit in the not so sunny day. I charged it via usb today. I will put it out tomorrow if I get a break in the action to see how it does, a RAK with two 18650s, two 3w 5v solar panels and a 900mA DFRobot solar panel controller. I think I will be able to keep it up most of the time as long as I don't get it wet or the panels get covered with snow.

[quasi beacon]

Nice! I see your red and purple nodes 0 hop from my home node but a very weak signal. Will the solar node be in a better spot than those?

And a good rule of thumb for rak power consumption is 1 watt-hour per day. So 5-6ah with 2 18650s should get you about 3 weeks of run time without any sun.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah the connections down here have been very sporadic. Seeing 27 online from my home node at the moment but it was up to 50 for a bit earlier today.

[quick sage]

Purple is a heltec v2.1 so I have to force a firmware on it. And I need to do it again. I have that one in my 2nd floor bedroom north side of the house. Red is a lilygo that I used to have on my desk under a bunch of stuff. I moved it to my office window on the north side of the house. All the others are either on my desk or near that same window. I have white setup with the mqtt so it looks like it is feeding the mqtt server with the rest of the nodes it hits. which is kind of cool, kind of a mqtt router.

I don't know if my gutters are steel or aluminum, I have magnetic bases on the bottom of the solar. I might try and stick it on a gutter on the south side of the house. My luck it will fall and shatter the 3d printed box. lol. If that doesn't work I will probably put it on the deck so I can see it and not forget about it.

The batteries I have in solar say 9900 mAh, I am not sure that is true but it seems to run down about as fast as the 3000mAh I have in Yellow. Yellow is another RAK.

[distant kettle]

I was able to traceroute you once early this morning

But that's obviously a super sketchy route at those SNR levels. I can actually hear your node pretty much all the time, but I don't have the juice to get back to you

[hard heath]

I've been around 40-50 here, which is a bit lower than usual. It's a lot lower at work, but all the concrete in the walls doesn't help.

[hard heath]

Nice to see you were able to get that through! Strange that I can't pick you up out here though. Maybe when I get a Yagi back up

[quasi beacon]

Do you have those flat metal roof vents? Might be a good spot for the magnetic mount. I've done several mag mount antenna installs like that and they work well.

Also, with multiple nodes at 1 location, it's usually a good idea to set the best performing one on client and the others on client mute. This prevents them trying to transmit over each other and also cuts down on traffic in general.

[quasi beacon]

PHHM is a 1 watt node right? That's probably the main factor. Very common to have a 1 way connection between a high power and standard power node from what I've seen with EBT.

[hard heath]

Yeah it's one of the higher powered nodes. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the communication is so one sided at times. More power is nice to have but sometimes it's just like yelling with your ears plugged and trying to hear whispers.

[hard heath]

This is a great idea. Makes me wish I had these vents.

[quick sage]

I do have those way up top of the roof.. not easy to get to...

[quick sage]

good to know. for the longest time I felt like an island until recently. it was me and a cranky guy in the Ozarks was the closest node for the longest time.

[hard heath]

First time I've picked up anything west of the river. Only saw this one because of the flight node heading over around the same time.

It was right near the army national guard training site

[young kernel]

I think that's one of the few I see pretty regularly in Lincoln.

[hard heath]

I'd never seen it before, and it was only about 17km out. Well within usual hailing distance. But getting anything out west of 204th street seems like a tall order.

[narrow ledge]

Yippie! I got my Station G2. Also got a Nano VNA so I can separate the good antennas from the junk.

It’s running as FFG2. But, unfortunately, I haven’t seen any nodes outside of downtown for a while today.

[distant kettle]

@narrow ledge I got this but I'm not sure the return path works

[narrow ledge]

I did not get your reply. I’ve not seen anything from outside of downtown for a few hours. Are your nodes offline?

[distant kettle]

agv3 is online

the others I sometimes have up are shut down to cut down on chatter since the mesh is already in a poor condition with EBT down

I'm still seeing telemetry and stuff from FFG2 though

It's easier to get out of downtown than it is to get into downtown, with all the clutter there. It's like you're shining a flashlight at me, and I'm shining a flashlight back at you, but you have a bunch of other people nearer by shining flashlights in your face at all different angles and stuff blocking your view. I would see your flashlight easily but you'd have a hard time spotting mine

I still think that a well-placed router near, but outside of, downtown would pretty much fix this

A node a little bit away from all the buildings and interference sources would be able to hear others outside of downtown and then regenerate a stronger signal to be received within downtown

If I ever get around to getting up on my roof I might experiment with a yagi pointed north and see if that helps at all

You might also try experimenting with directional antennas pointed towards EBT (when it's back up). That might be enough to do it

[narrow ledge]

I’m not sure I could get away with something as indiscreet as a yagi on my rooftop patio, but I’d consider it in my 7th floor window. Maybe that would be good enough to bridge the mesh.

[narrow ledge]

What kind of signal strength are you getting from FFG2 vs. FFX1?

[quasi beacon]

Great analogy!

[quasi beacon]

I was in council bluffs for a bit this morning with the t1000 and your G2 was the first node I saw. Picked up very strong on the 24th St bridge over i80, but then I was parked between buildings and my signal couldn't get out. I was still receiving various node updates which I assume were hopping through ffg2 or DT16, including one from midtown. But I couldn't get a trace or message out.

[quasi beacon]

Might try to get it going this weekend. Otherwise mid-late next week is supposed to warm up a bit.

[hard heath]

Glad you got it! Haven't seen it out this far but I've been pretty deaf to anything east of about 120th or so. I finally crawled in my attic to update PHHM and hooked up PHYG with a big Yagi pointed roughly at AGOV and EBT. I'm about to go back and put another one up with a different Yagi pointed downtown. Too many nodes but I'm pretty sure that one will be PHEX. I don't plan on running them all the time like PHHM though.

[hard heath]

Do you think you could get away with a larger omnidirectional fiberglass antenna? It just looks like a long section of PVC, and can be painted to match surroundings if need be. I've tested and built a lot of antennas, but haven't found one yet that works better than a 10dBi colinear fiberglass antenna on PHHM. Yagis can accomplish more consistent connections with line of sight, but even that is hard to accomplish.

If I were staying in the area long term, I'd find a way to mount the fiberglass antenna up high and outside (likely on a flagpole or as an actual part of the flagpole mast to appease the draconian HOA). Even without that, PHHM in my attic performs well.

I use a four foot fiberglass antenna. I gave my brother a 2 foot one for use downtown in his apartment and after he hooked it up last night I started seeing him again after being gone for several days while testing a Yagi. Even without EBT up, I can see him now. I also started being able to see your new G2 after that. Though I can't traceroute it.

[narrow ledge]

Do you have a link to the 2 foot antenna? I could test that, inside, at least.

[hard heath]

https://a.co/d/0nB1yBR

I have two of these, but you can buy them all over the place and not just Amazon. The included coax is crap though. I use really short N type to Ipex adapters for PHOF and my brother's X4RE.

Both of the ones from Amazon tested well on a VNA. The 10dBi four footer I have on PHHM also came from Amazon, though it isn't available there anymore. Other listings for 4 footers are though, including at Rokland. I really suspect they're all the same manufacturer anyway.

[narrow ledge]

Ordered. Hope to be able to test this weekend. Thanks!

[hard heath]

I hope it works as well for you as it has for me! You might need a good SMA to n-type adapter if you plan to use it with the G2. Pretty sure the included cable is RP-SMA, and there's a ton of loss with the length and the included SMA/RP-SMA adapter. I never used either of them.

[narrow ledge]

Also got this shorter cable on the way. I think it has the right connectors.

[hard heath]

Should work well I think. I've used cables from that company before

[narrow ledge]

Well, now I’m concerned. I noticed my G2 didn’t seem to be working as I expected. Then I noticed I couldn’t get it to get a direct trace to some of my other nodes, like the ones on the roof. My Heltec V3 could do it no problem. I only got a response when I cranked up the power to 30. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like this before. Any hints? I promise I never had it on without an antenna.

[narrow ledge]

I’m going to leave it off for a while and see if that helps. I’ll also reflash it.

[narrow ledge]

Never mind. I’m a dummy. It needs more than regular USB 5v. 🤦🏻‍♂️

[hard heath]

Ah I forgot about that with the G2. It's pretty power hungry. Really nice node though. Glad you got it sorted!

[remote zephyr]

I had to try a couple different USB C PD chargers before I found one that agreed with the G2

[narrow ledge]

I’ve got it connected to a 90W laptop power supply. Amazon will deliver to me some USB-C cables and power blocks later. Hopefully those will work for me.

[hard heath]

Trying to get more information on Station G2 nodes and usage. From this chart, it looks like it operates similar to the Ebyte 33S board where you need to pay attention to how much gain is being applied, and can't go over 19dB in the Mesh app (for 36.5 dB after amplification). Looks to be set at 10dB from the factory. For those with Station G2 nodes, what level are you setting your SX1262 Tx power in the Mesh app?

I'm not the regulations/ham police. Just curious what your experiences are in Omaha.

[quasi beacon]

Would be interesting to attach a G2 and another low power node to a fixed antenna (separately) with another node receiving from a fixed position and measure the received rssi from node 2. If the chart is accurate, the "10dbm" setting should come in ~8db higher than a standard Rak or heltec. And if we extrapolate down to lower levels, "2dbm" should match a standard node.

If that lines up, just keep it at 10dbm if you're aiming to keep it legal. Then just keep your antenna gain at/below 6dbi for the ERP (radiated power) limit.

[narrow ledge]

I’ve been reading and looking for recommendations on how to configure my G2 and came across the documentation you shared. I was confused at first on how to set it, but this clears things up a bit. I’ve currently got mine at 11 (because it’s one more than 10). Given the reputation the G2 has (I think) for not receiving as well as it can transit, it doesn’t make sense to blast out a signal if you can’t maintain a connection.

[hard heath]

Kind of similar for the Ebyte 33S board. You have to watch the Tx level in the app because it doesn't reflect the actual output under amplification. The 33S reaches full power (33db) when set to 8db in the app. The manual is pretty specific about never going over 9db in the app or you'll cook the board. Not an issue for the G2 as I'm pretty sure the firmware is compiled with safeguards in mind (limiting to a max of 19db in the app regardless of what you type in). This is not so when you're rolling your own firmware with Ebyte 33S boards. Very, very easy to smoke one with the factory 22db in app setting. The Ebyte 30s is a different story. Much lower amp power, so the 'standard' 22db app setting equates to 30db output once amplified. Much more 'legal' friendly.

I can already throw out more power than I need with 33S boards, but I was looking at the Station G2 for something more adept at Rx. Not sure there's a big difference though.

Receive sensitivity for the 30S board is -150dbm, while the 33S is -135dbm. I haven't found an exact spec for the Station G2, only that it's '4db' better than the G1. Might not be looking in the right place.

[narrow ledge]

The antenna came today. You were right about the crappy cable. Mine was missing the pin in the SMA connector. 🤦🏻‍♂️

[hard heath]

Yeah that's by design, or I think mine was. It's an SMA-RP cable (reverse polarity) so the pin is missing. It should have come with an adapter you can use to convert it to regular SMA. But regardless, the cable is crap.

[narrow ledge]

You’re right! In my excitement upon receiving it I didn’t bother to inspect the packaging or read the instructions. 🤣

[narrow ledge]

Even with the crappy cable, it tests out at 1.2 SWR with the antenna sitting on my couch.

I think I’m mostly done with the rooftop patio node, DT16. I still need to tidy up the power cable once it warms up a bit. I’m hoping this doesn’t annoy or frighten the neighbors. I’m still on the fence if I should lock the box, or at least put a little zip tie on it.

[narrow ledge]

This camera zoom out makes it look way bigger than it is. The box measures 5.9"x3.9"x2.8"

Here’s an update on my externally powered T1000-E node that was discreetly placed on the roof. It was connected to a 3000 mAh battery and left outside in the elements. The external battery gave out a couple of days ago, and the card itself shutdown sometime overnight. This gave me about 7-8 days of usage. It did seem to shutdown at least twice during the coldest nights. I’ve got a 10,000 mAh battery in a similar size that I might try in the future. I might also want to find some kind of minimalist case to help protect the battery and contacts from the elements.

[hard heath]

Nice work! A zip tie might not be a bad idea just to know if anyone was messing with it. Didn't you have a message written on one of the nodes explaining what it was? Hopefully the neighbors don't mind.

[hard heath]

Yeah I was really pleased with the SWR readings I had with mine. Honestly the cable from yours might be totally fine. I just saw a lot of loss from mine and it was way too long for my uses anyway. With the G2 you could always increase Tx power to overcome the losses though.

[narrow ledge]

Hey, @outer delta ! I haven’t seen CWE online for a while. It might be interesting to see what our isolated mesh looks like now that EBT has been out of the mix for several days.

[quasi beacon]

Nice balmy day today. 😂 I swapped boards and it's running in the tree again.

[narrow ledge]

I thought I noticed something.

[narrow ledge]

Nice job!

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, RP is the standard connector type for helium hotspots. The market got flooded with a bunch of gear for that a couple years ago. Lord knows how many setups are out there running without the center pin none the wiser! (And wondering why they only have 100yds of range)

[quasi beacon]

Looks great!

[quasi beacon]

I bet if you put some sort of sticker on this with an official looking logo saying something about "weather station", nobody would blink at it. 😂

[quick sage]

I set solar (STFN) outside to charge today. Looks like it is taking charge. Gutters are aluminum so it won't stick to them. I do have some hops trellis (beer hops) that I could stick it onto to get it a bit higher.

[narrow ledge]

Ok. Here’s another experiment. Here’s FFX2, a T1000-E, inside a brown paper sleeve taped to the inside of a west facing stairwell window 14 floors up. I figured the this would look less suspicious than just the card itself. If this works, I might try pairing it with a battery.

[narrow ledge]

Also hoping the wire mesh in the glass doesn’t affect it too badly.

[narrow ledge]

I thought about that. But then wondered if someone might say, “Cool! How can I get the weather data.” 🙄

[quasi beacon]

Yeah I was just going to comment at that. Could e problematic, but only one way to find out!

[quick sage]

Hey Red is !a2edb178 you. Showing up at the first national tower on the map.

[quasi beacon]

Can you open the window and find a way to secure it to the outside ledge out of sight? Recharging might be a pain though.

[hard heath]

No that's my brother. Not sure why it shows the tower. Probably his GPS settings. He's nearer to 18gh and Farnam.

[hard heath]

Showing up for me as 3 hops away. Your G2 is 2 hops out, and DTOFA16 is 1 hop. No luck on traceroutes though.

[narrow ledge]

Thanks for the report.

[narrow ledge]

It’s a 100+ year old window in a hard to reach area in the stairwell. I would bet it hasn’t opened in a long time. 🤣

[quasi beacon]

Check this out... Traced when I was connected to EBT. Crazy route out and then a fairly solid signal straight back.

[quasi beacon]

Fair enough. Do you know the gpm nodes? From the trace I just shared?

[narrow ledge]

That’s wild!! Yes, that’s my buddy in Gifford Park near Duchesne Academy. His nodes are inside upper floor house windows (one west, one east). I think if he could put one outside, that it might help bridge the east/west divide.

Funny, REDX is in my pocket.

[quasi beacon]

Interesting. I bet FFX2 in the West window has a solid connection to those 2.

[distant kettle]

There is a very interesting sort of asymmetry in the routing to and from nodes downtown. Basically, FFX2 is the only one that can reliably hear from Bellevue, and DT16 is the only one that can reliably be heard in Bellevue

For example a traceroute to DT16 will always go:
me > EBT > FFX2 > (sometimes one or more of FFX1 and FFG2) > DT16
And on the way back it just goes:
DT16 > me

This pattern shows up for basically any other node I can manage to traceroute in downtown. It always enters the downtown cluster via FFX2, and exits downtown via DT16

I can always hear DT16 directly but DT16 never appears to be able to hear me or EBT directly

As seen here. The highlighted parts are basically fixed hops for any routing in and out of downtown

Maybe this information will be useful for figuring something out about node placement, idk

[distant kettle]

looks like AMC was seeing something similar but not identical running traces from EBT earlier

Perhaps DT16 would benefit from a higher gain antenna with a flatter pattern to kinda see past the downtown clutter

[quasi beacon]

Would be really interesting to run an sdr up there and see what other radio traffic there is at ~907mhz and neighboring frequencies. Seems that there's so much noise there that it's drowning out any marginal signals from being received. We saw this with several of @narrow ledge 's T1000 rooftop placements as well. I suspect whatever node ends up being the link out of downtown will need close to 0 (or +) SNR to be reliable. Or, rather than an antenna change on DT16, maybe some really specific filtering. I haven't messed with filters before, but the good stuff is pretty expensive.

[narrow ledge]

Thanks for the reports. Great data!

If FFX2 has some sort of advantage in hearing known good and well connected routers/clients like EBT, would there be any value in setting FFX2 to router or repeater mode?

I suppose I could try it out for a while and see if there’s any improvement.

[distant kettle]

@narrow ledge

[narrow ledge]

Took two tries for me to get ACK on “hey cool”. And two tries for “testing” and no ACK.

[distant kettle]

I can't seem to stick a traceroute to REDH nor do I get the final "delivery confirmation" ack on messages to you, so still some reliability issues, but seems like we're getting somewhere with getting downtown connected to the mesh

[narrow ledge]

I’ve made some changes downtown. Both DT16 and FFX2 are running in router mode. The idea is if these two seem to have a decent path to EBT and AGV then maybe prioritizing these in router mode will help.

[distant kettle]

(and by "we" I mean "mostly you" lol)

[narrow ledge]

But I’m by no means an expert here. If router mode here isn’t helping, or is destructive, I will change them back to client.

[distant kettle]

I think ROUTER_LATE will be very useful downtown when it's fully supported

[narrow ledge]

I’ll have to check that out. Is it in an alpha version?

[distant kettle]

it was added in 2.5.18 alpha but AFAIK actually configuring that mode is not supported in the mobile apps currently. believe you have to use the Python CLI to put a node in that mode right now.

also, I have reason to believe 2.5.18 has issues on nrf52 devices so wouldn't recommend everyone rush to upgrade

Basic concept of ROUTER_LATE is that it repeats everything it hears, like ROUTER, but only after the timeslots where ROUTER and CLIENT nodes rebroadcast. So the idea is that it doesn't "get in the way" and consume any hops if the packet would be delivered normally by routing through ROUTER and/or CLIENT nodes

Is specifically intended for nodes that maybe don't have the best performance but are placed such that they can potentially fill in dead spots

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/pull/5528

[narrow ledge]

Yeah, I think that describes the situation downtown. I’ll try it, but probably after it becomes more stable. I can easily flash my T1000-E nodes, but flashing DT16 would require me to bring my laptop up to the roof.

[quasi beacon]

I would suggest testing with only 1 of these in router at a time. Otherwise they'll be rebroadcasting on top of each other

[narrow ledge]

Ok. I set DT16 to client.

Looks like I can't set the ROUTER_LATE mode by its name, but I think the data is stored as an integer, and I can set that to anything. I'm going to guess that the new mode is number 12. I will poke some different values in there and see if I can build a table. I couldn't find any documentation that relates the names to the numbers, but I bet it's in the code.

[narrow ledge]

Found this in the developer chat. I will try it on FFX1 and replace FFX2 up in the window.

[narrow ledge]

Done. Look for FFX2 now running alpha firmware using ROUTER_LATE mode.

[hard heath]

Not surprised it shows up as unrecognized for those of us not on the alpha firmware. Cool to see it working though! I remain unable to get traceroutes to you, though I did get one through to my brother yesterday.

[quasi beacon]

Nice! Let us know how it goes. Downtown seems like a good use for the role.

[distant kettle]

tracert to TR2 on a kite in boys town

[distant kettle]

think the ability to display the node role as ROUTER_LATE depends on the app being up to date, not the node. I'm using a 2.5.15 node and I can see FFX1 displayed as ROUTER_LATE. Android app ver 2.5.16

node just passes an integer role enum to the app and the app decides how to display it

TR2 heard EBT at +1.5dB SNR on this tracert, that's pretty good for that distance

[gilded tide]

I wouldn't worry about this... as a commercial user in Omaha, seeing a noise floor of -115 is about as good as you'll get.

[gilded tide]

Yes, the 900 ISM band in Omaha is saturated. I've personally deployed hundreds of devices using omnis, yagis, panels, and reflectors, all over the area.

[dapper igloo]

This is correct. The names come from the protobuf definitions, and are bundled with both the firmware and the apps, but are not transmitted over the air. v2.5.16 is the earliest version of the android app which includes the protobuf update for ROUTER_LATE.

[dapper igloo]

We squashed a couple of notable bugs this morning for that role. The fix should be in 2.5.19, and is already merged into the main project branch on GitHub. Or I can build you a patched 2.5.18 later today if you'd like it ASAP for testing.

[distant kettle]

PR#5827, right? I've been watching that one

[dapper igloo]

Yep, that's the one 🙂

Didn't show up in testing on the SHORT_FAST mesh here, but @errant venture caught it on his LONG_FAST mesh where everything is slower, and it's thus easier to saturate the queue.

[quasi beacon]

Welcome! Do you have any meshtastic nodes in Omaha? Sounds like you have some amazing experience!

[gilded tide]

I "did." Lol. Nothing was "happening" last year and I had pulled them all down. I am one of the "repeater guys" and had them in "good" locations.

When warmer weather returns, I'll start putting them out again.

[narrow ledge]

Thanks for checking with us in Omaha. We have a fast growing mesh with some really smart folks building and installing nodes (I’m not that smart… just enthusiastic.)

I’d be game to try an updated version, but I’m in no hurry.

I just switched my alpha ROUTER_LATE back to client, as it seemed like my isolated mesh got even more isolated. I couldn’t even get back into remote admin mode and had to hike up the stairs to get within Bluetooth range. After the switch, I’m seeing the remote nodes start to show up again. I’m not sure if it’s the firmware, or my installation/implementation.

[gilded tide]

For the locals.... one is (will be back) at Crown Point.

[quasi beacon]

Sounds good! Keep us posted when you get them out again. If you have some really good locations/gear we can rearrange which nodes are running "router" if needed.

[gilded tide]

All these are router quality locations. Typical direct view sheds are 25 miles.

One site in particular is somewhat a paradox. Due to the antenna and available mounting location, there is a 3-4 mile diameter shadow around it, however, provides good coverage beyond.

[dapper igloo]

That is almost certainly the result of the bug we just fixed. It causes packets to get stuck in the TX queue and go nowhere (hence, the unresponsiveness).

What's the hardware platform you're running on? I'll build you a patched version of 2.5.18 with the bugfix on top.

[gilded tide]

g2

or esp32s3

[dapper igloo]

Which esp32s3 device specifically? There are tons of them.

Or were you just referring to the station G2, and clarifying that it was an esp32s3 device?

[errant venture]

Yup, this was some of the things I noted, becuase a packet can queue longer then the timeout for remoteadmin (in one case) and on long_fast is very likely to continue to be the case (I didnt actually test this last night (Aus time)

Even connected directly, trying to go through the config menu's on the phone of a device in router_late was... super dragged out once the queue got full.

[quasi beacon]

Like 72nd & crown point at the TV towers??

[gilded tide]

Like 🙂

[gilded tide]

Station G2

[narrow ledge]

I was testing on a T1000-E. Please let me know if you need any more info. I also have Station G2 and/or Heltec V3 where I might try ROUTER_LATE eventually.

[gilded tide]

I just pulled a G2 off the shelf. I do have the potential to place one in service on Wednesday, time permitting. Lots of work queued up for mid-week due to the warm up. Getting paid first, playing second.

[narrow ledge]

Dang!

[quasi beacon]

Wow!!!! Something on one of those thousand+ foot towers would be incredible!

If this materializes, we will need to talk about moving the mesh to medium fast... My router node is already almost overloaded with traffic. Something at that height would be trying to rebroadcast every packet in the city.

[gilded tide]

lol, no, not at "1,000" hahaha. Keep in mind, the highest amateur repeater "around" is only at 700'

However, any of the sites I can place things are at 200' or higher.

[quasi beacon]

Sorry, I jumped to conclusions. I dream of a node up there every time I see those 4 towers flashing red lights at night. 😂

[quasi beacon]

Still amazing! Can't wait to see how this goes.

[gilded tide]

FWIW, one site we won't use.... at 600', due to commercial LoRA already there...

[hard heath]

Lots of exciting things going on here today I need to catch up on! Routers or repeaters up high sounds great to me.

Would there be any reason to discuss moving away from the default 'slot 20' along with moving to medium_fast?

[quasi beacon]

Is this the woodman? I can't think of any other structures in Omaha that tall.

[quasi beacon]

I think med-fast goes to another frequency by default.

Correction, tried and it does keep the same frequency slot if you just manually change the modem preset. Yeah that would be a good idea to change the frequency at the same time. Would make sense to pick a frequency slot strategically based on traffic.

[narrow ledge]

If we move to a different channel/mode (vs LongFast), how do we make sure newcomers know? Social media? A website? Word of mouth? Some legacy nodes advertising on the primary channel? How have other areas handled this?

[hard heath]

A combination of a few I think, but I've only ever seen Chicago's mesh and at the time they just had some legacy nodes advertising a private channel. It wasn't on a different slot or modem preset at the time though. The legacy nodes advertised a website that had details for getting set up properly.

Honestly I think it's a good idea for several reasons. We also have several older nodes with dated firmware still running router_client and throwing wrenches in things. There's one close to me that drives me nuts. I don't think it's well placed at all, but the owner never responds to messages.

[quasi beacon]

@gilded tide Oh wait, that must be the First national tower. Just looked it up and woodman is less than 500ft. FN is the only structure in NE over 600. How many arms would you need to twist to hook a meshtastic node into that antenna?? 😂

And on a serious note, what is the application that setup is being used for?

DM me if you can't share publicly. I'm fascinated by this stuff.

[quasi beacon]

Man, we might need to start thinking about a faster modem setting even without any more growth or without better routers. Just looked at EBT's stats for the last 24 hours and more than 2/3's of the hourly updates show greater than 25% channel utilization, and when I was connected via the app the peaks were near 50%. Many of the non-essential updates stop sending above 25%.

Also saw the online node list hit 70 briefly earlier this evening.

[dapper igloo]

Here you go - have built for all three of those, plus RAK4631, as those seem to be very commonly used at relay sites. This is the 2.5.18 release with the PR 5827 bugfix on top. No other changes.

[quasi beacon]

For anyone who's interested, I did some tinkering with various modem settings to see the airtime differences on the SDR. This was a 200 character message sent to a second node, pause ~5 seconds, and respond with a 200 character message (the shorter lines are the ack.) For long slow, this screen shot was only part of one message/ack. (in order: Short Fast, Medium Fast, Long Fast, Long Slow)

[quasi beacon]

According to the meshtastic docs, theres a 5db hit in link budget moving from long fast to medium fast. But it looks like the airtime is roughly a quarter. Would be interesting to see how mesh reliability compares. (eg. how important is signal strength vs packet collisions/congestion.)

[dapper igloo]

We moved from LONG_FAST to SHORT_FAST for our mesh back in September (Wellington region in New Zealand). Overall reliability got a lot better. The SNR was about 6dB better across the board on SF as compared to LF (less noise on the SF frequency maybe?). Any link that had decent LoS continued to work well, including our 254km long link. Links that were marginal on LF got worse, or became unusable. Links that relied on bouncing off hills got worse. Links from moving vehicles were more easily interrupted (shorter transmission time = brief obstruction can take out the entire packet, vs on LF brief obstructions were more survivable).

Channel util went from peaking over 60%, with a completely unusable mesh, to peaking at around 5-7%, with a steady state typically around 4%.

Responsiveness is a lot better... SHORT_FAST is fast, and the delays are a lot shorter - so the overall user experience is much better.

The current size of our mesh is roughly 180 nodes regularly connected. I typically see ~120 within a couple of hours from my home.

[narrow ledge]

Cool! Thanks much!

[distant kettle]

There has been discussion for some time now about MEDIUM_FAST possibly becoming the default in Meshtastic 3.0

[dapper igloo]

That would make a lot of sense. Too many congested LONG_FAST meshes.

It's grown well beyond what was originally envisaged.

[distant kettle]

Is possible to set up a bridge between two meshes on different modem presets and frequency slots using two nodes connected to a little private MQTT instance or with a script like e.g. https://github.com/pdxlocations/ChannelLink-for-Meshtastic

[distant kettle]

I'm not sure this is the case? The documentation, source code, and my own tests all reflect that changing to MEDIUM_FAST preset also changes the slot default to 45

Maybe you're doing something slightly different to what I'm doing, though, dunno

[dapper igloo]

It keeps it if you changed it from the default 0 (which will use whatever the default for the modem preset is) at some point previously. If you never touched that setting, then it will change automatically.

The same goes for the primary channel name - if you left it empty, it'll update automatically. If you entered something in there, then it'll remain.

[distant kettle]

That explains it -- it's actually stored as 0 if it's never been changed. thought it might be something like that. thanks

well, later today I'll throw an extra node on MEDIUM_FAST slot 45 if anyone wants to play around with that

[narrow ledge]

I might try this in the early evening. I’ll check in with you later to see if you’re still running it. Sometimes we have a path.

[narrow ledge]

I just set this up downtown.

[quasi beacon]

Thanks! I would have never put this together on my own. 😂

[quasi beacon]

Found this... Looks like long fast and medium fast run on the same frequency, but other modem settings (eg long slow) running different different bandwidths do have different frequencies for any given slot.

https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/

[narrow ledge]

I didn’t change anything else. Primary channel is still using the default key.

[narrow ledge]

I also set REDX to the same and have it with me. I might switch RED3 over to add more traffic to the mesh.

[narrow ledge]

So by setting the MF slot to 45, we are on different frequency than LF?

[quasi beacon]

I think you have to manually change the modem setting to medium fast

[distant kettle]

Medium fast runs on 45 by default. Not sure where you see otherwise on that page

[quasi beacon]

I just hooked to sdr to a 900 antenna on the roof. Will see how the 913.125 frequency looks

[quasi beacon]

Sorry, meant that if they are on the same slot, it uses the same frequency. Whereas long slow is on a different frequency for the same slot.

[distant kettle]

slot = frequency, always. bandwidth is another issue

observe behavior of freq slot field when changing modem preset. I can find chapter and verse of the source code too if need be

but in any case, to avoid confusion, can always just stipulate that everyone should manually set freq slot

[distant kettle]

oh I see what you're saying. yeah, the center frequency for slots is defined differently on those settings that use a different bandwidth, you're right

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, absolutely. I'm bound to miss something otherwise. 😂

So 913.125 looks pretty noisy...

[distant kettle]

last I looked, the whole damn 915 ISM band is pretty noisy :p would be interested if everyone with an SDR wants to survey the band and compare notes, though

[quasi beacon]

Just from a quick scan through the band, slot 100 (926.875) out at the upper edge looks pretty clean

[distant kettle]

might be worth doing some comparisons between freq slots if we want to dig that deep. run some tests with the range test module or whatever.

I will note that some antennas are narrowly tuned enough that the SWR may be nontrivially worse out at the ends of the band

[quasi beacon]

Yeah good point

[distant kettle]

later today I will try to get around to setting up my spare RAK on medium fast defaults

[quasi beacon]

I'm going to move EBT and my home node over to med-fast slot 100 for some testing if anyone else wants to join.

[distant kettle]

might also be able to get my friend who has to drive around all day for work to carry a t1000 on medium fast also

[narrow ledge]

I’ll join you with two nodes.

[narrow ledge]

RED3 and REDX are now on MF 100. I can’t touch any others from where I am now. I’m up pretty high, but inside an office environment.

[quasi beacon]

Ughhh.... Guys, I suck at this. I forgot to enable Bluetooth before messing with the other settings on EBT remotely. Tried to move to medium fast slot 100 and it's unresponsive now. 😬

But I did get a nice bump in SNR between my home node and t1000, so there's that. 😂

[gilded tide]

You're not alone... the G2 is either BT or wifi... I run mine on wifi.

Not having BT is sometimes..... irritating

[quasi beacon]

Yeah my router node is 50 ft up in a tree. It's a nightmare to climb. I manage it remotely and usually leave the BT off. I usually try to remember to remotely enable it before messing with other settings so I can go to the site and fix anything that way. Totally forgot this time.

[quasi beacon]

If you've been away for awhile you might not have seen the remote admin (over Lora) feature yet. It's pretty sweet.

[gilded tide]

oh no, I've been using that since 2.4

[distant kettle]

I put agv3 on MEDIUM_FAST slot 100 and I can see EBT.

[quasi beacon]

Oh good! Maybe it's just something on my end

[distant kettle]

Make sure your ch. 0 is named MediumFast on the device you are trying to remote-manage with. I believe ch0 name and key must be the same for remote management to work, since it technically rides on that channel

If you have ever messed around with the default channel list on the device you are using to remote-manage, it may not have correctly changed the channel name for ch0 when you changed the modem preset

it sees it as "non-default" so doesn't overwrite it, much like if you have messed with the frequency slots before

[quasi beacon]

Which EBT do you see? I had turned on the spare board under a different name to check something.

[distant kettle]

I switched agv3 temporarily to MF slot 100 and I see EBT and AMCH but not RED3 or REDX. @narrow ledge can you confirm that your channel 0 is configured like this?

[quasi beacon]

But might have showed up as EBT. I still don't see it

[distant kettle]

I see EBT ending in 5fac

Odd. I was able to direct message and tracert AMCH via EBT

[quasi beacon]

Ok good, that's the right one

[distant kettle]

It's definitely the right EBT. +10dB SNR

[quasi beacon]

My home node just went bonkers. Had to cut power and reset

[quasi beacon]

How's the SNR look compared to long fast?

[distant kettle]

4dB better

[quasi beacon]

Nice!

[distant kettle]

my RAK is acting a little funny since changing it actually. Bluetooth transactions are very slow. Not sure what to make of that

maybe something to do with how the polling loop timing works on different presets? dunno

MF 100 tracert to AMCH

[distant kettle]

I saw your f6f8 RAK show up as "test"

Don't see @narrow ledge nodes but need to confirm he is using the ch0 name "MediumFast" since the protocol cares about the names

[narrow ledge]

I just changed channel 0 to look like this:

[distant kettle]

ok, I had to force stop the android app to get it to stop acting weird after changing the modem preset. go figure. @quasi beacon maybe try that

[quasi beacon]

Thank you!!!! This did it. I had closed/opened the app but didn't do a force stop previously

[distant kettle]

OK cool. Yeah it was acting incredibly squirrelly for me. Something doesn't get cleaned up right when reconnecting to the same node after changing modem preset I guess

[quasi beacon]

Yeah weird, I had never seen that before when testing in the past

[distant kettle]

I always have to force stop it when switching between wifi and BT connected nodes too

[quasi beacon]

Good to know, will keep this in mind

[distant kettle]

Still not seeing any of @narrow ledge's but considering that that was a very marginal link already on LONG_FAST and with the benefit of routing through the mesh I wouldn't be surprised if it's just too long a shot

At some point I would like to try MF slot 45 and see if it's actually appreciably worse. Staying nearer to defaults may be preferable for user experience purposes if we do indeed migrate the mesh

[narrow ledge]

I’ll leave them running like this for a while just in case a path opens up. I’m on the north side of a building, inside, so any RF path would be obstructed. I could try setting one of my home nodes to the experimental channel later. They have a little better northern exposure.

[distant kettle]

also, I need to get off my ass and do more work on the website I was trying to create for coordination

OK. At some point I want to put agv3 back on longfast, but before I do I'll stand up a new experimental node to leave on mediumfast

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, this is a good point. And I'm wondering if all the weirdness I'm still seeing is related to being on a non-standard frequency slot. I still can't ping EBT, which means it might be stuck on med-fast slot 100 until I can climb the tree next. 😬

[distant kettle]

weird. not sure why it's talking to me no problem but both (?) of your nodes are having trouble

[quasi beacon]

yeah, both the home node and t1000. I'll try a different one a bit later since those were both setup to admin EBT

[distant kettle]

In the future, if you want, you can add agv3's pubkey to the admin list and if you're ever locked out for some reason I can try to get in for you. I'll keep the current keypair backed up in case I have to factory reset again

it might be worth trying to reset nodedb on one of your nodes and seeing if you can reach EBT then. I have seen some funny things happen to nodedb once or twice that result in it confusing the addresses of two different nodes etc.

which in my case resulted in packets being addressed to an entirely different node address when I tried to interact with a specific node

[narrow ledge]

Oops. I meant north side. Edited.

[quasi beacon]

great call on the nodedb reset. Worked on the test node as you saw, will try on one of the admin nodes now

[distant kettle]

I swear there's some very interesting bugs hiding out in the nodedb code lol

[gilded tide]

Did Erayd provide anyone else with the new G2 build?

[narrow ledge]

Yes. I will try it out tonight with a node running ROUTER_LATE

[distant kettle]

agv3 is periodically rebooting for no good reason since switching to medium_fast slot 100

so, that's fascinating

i believe we may have angered the gods.

[quasi beacon]

Gremlins!!! I did finally get back into EBT after the nodedb reset. Bluetooth is ON for the time being. 😂 Thank you for the help this morning!!!!

[distant kettle]

lol. No worries

[gilded tide]

FYI, after I put it on a G2, I can't make changes to things like the modem preset. I already reported it to him.

[distant kettle]

today we have all been given a valuable lesson in why Meshtastic is still considered to be in beta

[quasi beacon]

Which of your nodes had the best connection to EBT previously? After the mess agov and I went through, it might be worth doing a force stop and a nodedb reset on whichever node you plan to test on, just for good measure. I had 3 different nodes that wouldn't interact with EBT at all until the reset

[distant kettle]

If you're not doing experiments that completely break the mesh at least 2x per week, then are you even truly living?

maybe the real "improvement to mesh performance" was the friends we made along the way

[quasi beacon]

trace routes are blazing fast... I really hope we get a connect to one of the downtown nodes. @narrow ledge can you connect to DT16 via bluetooth from inside or would you need to open the box?

[narrow ledge]

I can admin DT16 over the air with LoRa, but I don’t have the key on it for the devices I have with me right now. I can try it when I go home for lunch.

[distant kettle]

so far I think a valuable takeaway from all this is that migrating devices to a different mesh is potentially not as straightforward as it looks

[distant kettle]

proceed with caution since AMC was also using remote admin and had some fun and exciting problems with that after changing modem preset

[quasi beacon]

Or we're just unlucky today. I've tested so many times before like this and never had this many problems

[distant kettle]

I'm not prepared to rule out ghosts or maybe an ancient Sumerian trickster god

[narrow ledge]

I doubt original LongFast will ever go away. But the MediumFast could be an option for those who choose to ratchet their systems and skills up a notch.

[gilded tide]

"Ratcheting" is considered an advanced skill... I'm still using a rock.

[narrow ledge]

It’s not that hard for me to get up to the roof and BT in.

[gilded tide]

FWIW... these types of changes are not all that nice in the sites I can get to. We need to nail down what we want before I put anything up.

[distant kettle]

if we end up running another mesh on a different frequency/modem preset in the long term we can look into some options to bridge between that and longfast

[gilded tide]

Some of these may have a year or more between maintenance cycles.... ahem... not friendly to "beta" products lol

[distant kettle]

for sure. I think we're just experimenting for now and any sort of coordinated migration of our essential routers to a different mesh would be something we'd have to plan out a ways down the road

default longfast shouldn't ever totally go away anyway IMO because new users are never gonna find us if we all jump ship

[quasi beacon]

Lol, I totally get it. When I set up EBT, I tested out flashing firmware via BLE with the intention of never climbing the tree for node maintenance. Even used batteries that should last 20 years. Here a few months later I've been up there twice. 😂

[distant kettle]

I would definitely recommend smoke testing any new nodes for like a solid month before putting them in hard to reach areas, there are a few odd firmware bugs being hunted down right now that crash nodes dead

particularly on nrf52 platform

[quasi beacon]

The concern with the current mesh though is that we're already well over 100 nodes, with 60+ online at any given time, and the congestion is already causing reliability problems. With the type of locations @gilded tide might be bringing on, those router nodes are going to be rebroadcasting contstantly and miss a bunch of stuff on the RX side.

[distant kettle]

I think we somehow ended up with one of the densest meshes in North America

There are some denser areas, though, and I'm not aware of any other local communities that have migrated en masse away from default LongFast. In Europe there are a few that have gone to MediumFast, MediumSlow, or ShortFast, BUT they also have crazy restrictive duty cycle limits and even more congestion on their ISM bands over there, so they have other reasons for doing that too

I think we should talk to other local communities with dense meshes and find out how they are coping with congestion

Can't shake this suspicion that our congestion issues are for some reason slightly worse than they "should" be

[gilded tide]

I can't imagine we are "dense" lol... but, this is an issue with ad hoc networks in general. I see this in other roles too.

It's why "real" networks iterate into access, aggregation, and distribution, models.

[distant kettle]

there is some talk of doing more of that in meshtastic 3.0

[gilded tide]

Having a backbone channel is a good idea. Those would be fast links anyway. Then be able to tie into an aggregation layer to "neighborhoods", then the access layer to end users.

[quasi beacon]

So quick summary for anyone who doesn't want to go through the back scroll... EBT and a few others are temporarily testing modem setting "medium fast" with the frequency slot manually updated to 100. Still the default public psk. If anyone else wants to hop on to test, you might need to do a forced reset on the app and/or a nodedb reset if you're seeing anything strange.

[distant kettle]

yep, that's broadly one of the things I've been seeing get discussed

the current design never anticipated this kind of "city mesh" usecase

[gilded tide]

No mesh ever does 🙂

I won't mention AREDN

(who said that)

[distant kettle]

OKC has a similar size mesh and I'm being told they see like 6-11% ChUtil with 100+ nodes online

see, I really think there is something weird about our situation, the ChUtil figures we see never really "added up" to me

[quasi beacon]

I briefly bounced back to long fast to send a message to the mesh about the test. Remote admin is so crisp on med-fast comparatively. @hard heath total opposite from what we saw when testing long-slow.

[quasi beacon]

My guess is that the mesh just isn't well connected. I've seen this in several other cities including Miami last week. Their router nodes just weren't seeing much traffic.

[hard heath]

LongSlow was just glacial. I used a VPN to switch PhotonYagi over to MediumFast and slot 100. I tuned the antenna for 915mhz though so we'll see how that works out.

Awful quiet so far. I'll add PHEX to the mix and see what happens.

[quasi beacon]

One could argue that there could be other Lora traffic in Omaha contributing to channel util, however the other morning EBT was at 7% TX. And it obviously only rebroadcasts meshtastic packets. I don't know what that equates to in channel utilization, but it's a high multiple.

[distant kettle]

ensure ch0 name is also set to MediumFast or none of the discovery/telemetry/etc works

[hard heath]

Yep, done on both of them.

[distant kettle]

normally one or both of PHYG and PHEX are either direct or 1 hop thru EBT to me so I would expect to see them pop in unless the link budget hit from going to MediumFast is that bad over that range

well, that and the antenna tuning issue. I happen to know that the antenna on agv3 is just about at its best at ~907 and is going to be doing a little worse at 20MHz higher

[hard heath]

Yeah they weren't able to pick up anything except each other. Going to try moving PHHM over here in a bit.

[quasi beacon]

If I remember right, PHHM was something like -90 RSSI and single digit SNR to EBT previously. If that doesn't go through I would be surprised.

[hard heath]

Swapped over and I can see AMC Home. Can't get messages or a traceroute through though

[narrow ledge]

It doesn’t appear that I can remote admin the DT16 channels over the air, at least not with the iPhone app. I’ll try the CLI. If that doesn’t work I’ll head up to the patio.

[quasi beacon]

Yeah, strange. I see it but can't get trace route either. It must be ignoring EBT. I had the same problem earlier and had to reset the nodedb.

[hard heath]

Just reset it. I'll let it run awhile and keep my fingers crossed

[narrow ledge]

For these four nodes running MF 100, Channel 0, “MediumFast”

[narrow ledge]

CLI OTA worked to adjust channels. But I didn’t get an ACK because it breaks the link in flight.

[quasi beacon]

Looks like you've got a decent connection to EBT. But I could only trace through my test node, not from home for some reason. More gremlins...

[hard heath]

Same thing I'm seeing. Other nodes work fine, but I can't traceroute EBT. Can't even query for the actual name either. Last contact was 25 minutes ago

[distant kettle]

is possible the weird nodedb issue is also happening on EBT's end

might have to try to repro this, create a repeatable test scenario, dump the nodedb of a broken node, and report this as a bug. blah

any sort of mesh migration is going to be a bit of a nonstarter if it completely screws up the persistent state of most nodes on which it's attempted

[quasi beacon]

I was able to reset nodedb on EBT remotely. Let's see if this cleans up some of these issues

[quasi beacon]

Yeah no kidding. Especially for the average user who doesn't want to waste a day chasing down little issues like this.

[quasi beacon]

Is PHHM still on med-fast? I reset nodedb on EBT. Can't trace PHHM from either node now.

[narrow ledge]

If folks clear out the nodedb, or just let it sit. Doesn’t it eventually rebuild everything it sees?

[hard heath]

Yeah it's still on MediumFast. I reset the nodedb again hoping it would find EBT

Just stays like this.

[quasi beacon]

Man that's such a good signal from EBT too, did you ever see + SNR from it before? Doesn't make any sense that nothing's going through.

[distant kettle]

I can tracert PHHM reliably but DMs don't get the final "received" ack (where cloud with checkmark is replaced by person with checkmark)

extremely weird

every single tracert goes through

[hard heath]

Nope, I don't think I've ever seen it that high.

I can traceroute AGOV and send DMs, but mine never get the checkmark either

[distant kettle]

not receiving any DMs

what the heck.

[quasi beacon]

Lol, this is a comedy of errors

[distant kettle]

i'm telling you, it's ghosts

maybe pulling some debug logs over serial is in order here.

if the ghost doesn't get those too

[hard heath]

PHHM is in my attic. Could be haunted.

[distant kettle]

we're discovering some great new glitches and tricks for the Unusable Mesh Speedrun here today

[quasi beacon]

Yeah that's correct

Rebooted all nodes and crossing fingers.

[narrow ledge]

DT16 and FFX1 are set up in MF100, and were my best links to down south before. Hoping I’ll see something, but not yet.

[gilded tide]

My plan to take out the decentralized messaging is working..... egggsellent!

[quasi beacon]

Powerful commercial interests sent him in as a spy! 😂

[gilded tide]

Who knew it would be so easy????

I didn't even have to ask anyoen to hold my beer.....

[quasi beacon]

I was going to say I was surprised DT16 didn't get a signal out yet, because EBT always received that well. But with all the other oddities, who knows what's going on. 😂

[quasi beacon]

Have you tried sending any messages out yet?

[narrow ledge]

Just to make sure, here are screenshots of my config on one node. Note “MediumFast” channel name has no spaces.

[narrow ledge]

A few

[quasi beacon]

This all looks correct to me. @distant kettle @hard heath is it worth trying the standard slot 45? Or should we throw in the towel and go back to LF?

[hard heath]

I'm game to try slot 45 if you guys are

[quasi beacon]

Will move mine over

[hard heath]

Will do the same here. I'll throw in a nodeDB reset too for good measure

[quasi beacon]

Before we continue, does someone need to sacrifice a heltec V2 into the Missouri River to please the meshtastic gods?

[narrow ledge]

Well, now I’m not sure. I can’t TR, message, or admin DT16. It’s not responding.

[hard heath]

I've got a spare lying around here somewhere. Would need a trebuchet to get it that far from here though

Seeing messages from folks after reboots in ch0, but can't get a message back out. EBT shows as unrecognized and I'm unable to traceroute

[narrow ledge]

DT16 was in router mode. Trying to set it back to client but can’t admin into it now.

[quasi beacon]

Shouldn't be a problem since there's only a few nodes testing... I've had similar issues with admin after the Lora config changes. I assume it's still on slot 100?

[narrow ledge]

Maybe it needs a good reboot. Last seen 7 min ago.

[narrow ledge]

It was stuck in a reboot loop that seemed to persist after a power disconnect. I’ll let it drain for a while. I put REDX in the box.

[hard heath]

Still seeing nothing new on slot 45. Not sure my nodes like MediumFast.

[distant kettle]

the experiment is not complete until someone's node actually catches fire

[quasi beacon]

For the first 5 minutes or so I couldn't ping EBT or remote admin. Now it seems to be fine so I reset nodedb.

I'll reboot it again in a few minutes just for good measure since you received some messages after that last time.

[quasi beacon]

The ghost found its way downtown. 👻

[narrow ledge]

Ok, folks. Time for an update on the plan: please restate what setting we testers should be using now

[quasi beacon]

We're trying medium fast with the default frequency slot (45).

[narrow ledge]

No channel name?