High-altitude balloon flight OH3HAB #9 by club OH3AA on June 28th had 2 RS41 #radiosonde #Horus trackers running my RS41ng firmware (old RSM412 and new RSM425 #Vaisala models), a #Wenet photo transmitter + an experiment to have a #Meshstatic node (EFL) and a #MeshCore repeater by @OH3CUF in the payload.
There was strong #GPS interference, causing trackers to report incorrect position data - the new RS41 with multi-GNSS #ublox M10 chip did better!
I'll be posting more details + video!
Some praise, and some issues
Tldr: meshcore is great. Rooms are buggy and disappointing. Flashing devices from Android would save at much time and effort on the go. Direct messages should automatically try flooding after the saved path fails, it’s confusing for normies that it doesn’t. Post: I started with meshtastic about 2 years ago, there was no activity in my area, and my friends were interested but never got onboard. I recently moved, and my new location has a strong meshtastic presence. I initially was excited, and played with it for a couple of weeks, before becoming frustrated. Even with access to a strong network with many repeaters, it was basically impossible to hold a conversation with anyone more than 1 hop away. I read about meshcore, and wanted to try it. I also had a camping trip coming up, a trip where I knew I’d have access to a tall hill that should cover a lot of beach and campsites. Also, meshcore promised store and forward messaging, via rooms. Which to me is THE most appealing part of meshcore. So I spun up a repeater and a room, and a couple companion devices. Now disclaimer: I did put the room into repeat mode, to save on wasting an extra device, since I only have so meant to play with. At home, it all worked perfectly. But once I got to the site, the problems started. The repeater was up almost 100ft relative to camp, but after a half mile full of trees, only the companions with high gain antennas could access it. So I had to drive to a library to use their computer to flash a companion into a repeater 🤦♂️ Can we get flashing and programming from Android please? But that worked, I strung that up about 15/20 feet into a tree at camp, companions had signal for at least a quarter mile in all directions. Once that was working, I started testing the killer feature I wanted: rooms. But suddenly they weren’t working anymore. The room was hosted on the repeater on the hill, so it was one hop to get to it. But even the second room hosted on the camp repeater wasn’t working properly. I could have two companions logged into the same room, each sending messages that the other never ever got. Then I’d fire up a third companion, and it would log into the room and download the messages from one of the companions but not the other, and then its own messages weren’t seen by anyone else. They just… didn’t work. Direct messages worked well, and messages to the camp channel and public channel all worked perfectly. Heck we even got some tropo across the lake from Michigan into Wisconsin, 60 miles direct! But the rooms were not working properly. Just failing silently, which is the worst failure mode. We only had 4 companions going, middle of nowhere, so it’s not like we were overloading it, this was the perfect use case. The other problem we had, was the remembered routes didn’t switch to flood when they failed. So if I was at camp, texting my buddy directly, zero hop. But then I went to the beach and tried to 2 hop from the hill to the camp repeater, it would try 5 times zero hop, then fail to deliver, and quit. The path would change from “direct” to “flood”, and if I manually resent the message, it would flood correctly and reach him, then change the path to “2 hops”. This is fine for me, I understand what’s happening. But my friend is not techy, and struggled to grasp and remember what was happening and how it works and why it wasn’t working. It was frustrating for them. I feel like this should happen automatically? Ultimately we did end up using them a few times. I used them a lot for testing and probing and seeing where I could ping the repeaters, and how far the signal goes. The two times we really needed them, the relevant people either forgot their companion at camp (but still had their phone), or forgot to check it at all before deciding to send out a search party for me when I was late back to camp. I was like guys, check your phone. They checked, saw my message sitting there, and were like oh sorry 🤦♂️ I plan to try it again. I just really wish those rooms would’ve worked, and I don’t understand why they didn’t. Next time I’ll have a dedicated repeater, and a dedicated room 🤷♂️ maybe room repeat mode just isn’t ready for prime time. (Yes I know in a strong mesh, it’s preferable to keep them separate). But otherwise it was awesome, very cool technology. I made 1.8 miles contact, over 2 hops, just by setting up some repeaters. So very cool! And practical! [https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/7369e134-e02c-4dc0-82d1-1b19b7ebfbb0.jpeg]
If you'd like to translate #Meshy into your language, now is a good time. 26.07 will be released soon and there will be no string changes until then.
https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/meshy/
Bug reports are also welcome. 😉
Ok, I guess we solved how to link the CT #MeshCore network to the rest of the RI/MA/NH (and beyond) regional mesh.
This has now opened up the western/southern side of the map, Albany, NYC, NJ, PA etc.
Everything you see here is 100% community run, by individuals at their own expense and for the collective use of the community at large with some loose coordination.
There are many parallels to the #Fediverse here, it is a distributed network of non-corporate infrastructure for community use.
Chris J. Karr
Mikael Nousiainen
Neil E. Hodges
Marc
Astro
hereiamagain
Meshy
occult
Milan
Wolfie Rankin