Genuinely impressed with #meshtastic thus far. I've got a pair of ThinkNode M2s, and the antennas that come with them are literally bits of printed circuit board, and yet they've managed to get a surprising bit of range (maybe 300m) out of them with suboptimal placement and no special care.
I can see that with a real antenna and an elevated position they'd go quite well.
Whatever stroke of luck that was giving my #meshtastic node access to the rest of the mesh is gone. Until yesterday there was an otherwise silent node out there that was forwarding packets to and from mine.
I'm now anxiously awaiting my new antenna to arrive, because it feels wrong for my tiny radio child to be cut off from its friends.
Baby's first solar powered LoRa #meshtastic node.
Still waiting on a better antenna.
…and the battery that comes with the M2 board is *almost* enough to power it through the night. It would probably be fine in summer.
Luckily batteries are pretty inexpensive as well.
Aha, looks like I need Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) doodad for charging off a solar cell, and I doubt my $10 panel already has one integrated.
If I understand correctly, an MPPT doodad lowers the current draw from the panel to maintain enough voltage to charge; otherwise the battery charger can try to draw too much, which drops the voltage, and one gets nowhere.
A random blog post recommends a CN3791, which are only a few dollars, so I shall continue investigating
I've been trying to understand how antennas work, and it's all deep eldritch shit. Make sure your antenna is an exact fraction of the length of the silent whispers you wish to hear from the void. Make sure the antenna has a solid plane to bounce the whispers off, but somehow you can get away with just a couple of wires that suggests where a solid plane would go. Make sure your cable isn't a cursed length, which attracts unwanted attention.
RF engineers are heckin' magicians.
I really feel like #meshtastic would be an awesome thing to get high schools on board with, even if just informally.
If most schools had a node on a high building they'd mesh really well. Students could create their own channels, giving them a resistant, capitalism-free way of communicating as individuals and groups. Advertisers and social media bans can piss off, as students can create and manage their own networks.
Yesterday a new node showed up on #meshtastic with a huge amount of signal.
After some quick introductions it turns out we live in the same street. That got me invited to a group of radio nerds, and I'm going to a build day tomorrow to expand our local mesh.
This is how normal people make friends as adults, right?
Paul Fenwick
Dave Lane 
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