Bernd's Weblog

Next try: Solar powered meshtastic nodes. The devices come with a 800 mAh battery, peak current is 80 mA. Device is the Meshtastic GAT562 that uses nRF52840 as the main controller.

The device comes preprogrammed with meshtastic 868 with the current firmware 2.6.11 (beta).

battery is pre-loaded as the device has no external connections. Also firmware updates need to solder an USB-plug to the PCB.

It will be intersesting to see, if the device powers on again automatically after a low battery switch off.

Also my node in Wattens was able to hear the node up there, even if my node looks to west and not east:

the meshtastic node up there had some nice side effects: Wide-range to munich and also augsburg and the mesh network really big.

Note the number of hops and also the distances in the following stat:

As the t-deck has an own keyboard, no bluetooth connection with a smartphone is necessary to send messages. The Meshtastic Ui has some nice features, e.g.: Mesh detector: Listens for meshtastic nodes, useful for exploring, if you are within a/the mesh. Can last some time as the nodes only send beacons from time to time.

RSSI and SNR tool: Useful for detecting the appr. position of nodes. By the way: When they send gps data, you can also use the map feature (at the moment I copy positron 0-14 to my sd card).

Austria with tiles sized 1-12 only has apprx. 200 MB and 8000 tiles, now trying up to 13 and 14.

Update: Austria 0-13 has 31000 tiles

It is also possible with the Meshtastic UI to use a "map feature" but therefore you have to copy map tiles onto a SD card.

Some tile sets are available for download e.g. here

But the system has some implications: You have different zoom levels and the zoom is done by splitted up tiles. So all of Europe has 15 GB of data, but the main problem: More than a million files and all are small, only some kilobytes.

Means: You have to format the SD card with very small blocks and also then the unzipping and copying of the tiles takes a loooot of time

First result: Nearly the same amount of nodes as "down" in the Inntal valley. But: The Node "IBK Nord" could be received with a good signal of -113 dBm. Crazy, a WLAN worse than -80 or -90 dBm would be rated not working...

Node "IBK Nord" has a very good position indeed: I can also receive and use it from Wattens (with a weaker signal).

For my tests, this means: A message sent from Kellerjoch first traveled to IBK Nord and was then relayed back to my device in Wattens. We will see this in the message history later.

But first I did try a long-fast message to all reachable nodes (up to 3 hops) and got some replies. Please note the node Weerberg, this one was new for me. Meshtastic devices everywhere ;-) And you can see the hops (Sprungweite) already visible here.

Now I did send messages to my node in Wattens, they were acked by the mesh:

Back at home I looked into the meshtastic device there and the test messages were there, not received directly but via one hop:

And finally the stats of the device at Kellerjoch before switching it off:

Please note the new MAX with 934 kms, unbelievable, this is rank 4 in the all time stats, the leader with 969 kms, rank 5 has "only" 816 kms.

It makes a lot of fun to see the Austrian/international ranking and my receiver moving up the ranks ;-)

The ranking is based on the average of the daily maximum distance of the last 30 days.

AirUtilTX: In Europe, Meshtastic devices using the EU_868 frequency bands are subject to an hourly duty cycle limit of 10%. This means that the device will stop transmitting when it reaches this limit and resume when the time allows.

Regarding a better antenna: EU_868 is limited to 27 dBm *with* antenna: The maximum power allowed for Europe is +27 dBm ERP (Effective Radiated Power).

New peak with a lot of signals and 130 senders until lunch, more than 4 signals each second, receiver with high load, but also a new record with 237 kms ;-)

And I understand now, why there are nearly any nodes at https://meshmap.net/: You have to activate data send to MQTT manually.

Next step: Try a better antenna, I have here a 5 dBi antenna for 868 MHz, but have to look up the regulations before. More information: https://meshtastic.at/

Config via app a little bit tricky as all depends on the set region. Had to search a little bit,m the region (with frequency, power etc.) can be found under the menu LoRa.

Didn't expect anything as there are no nodes at all at https://meshmap.net/ but within some minutes the (small heltec) heard IBK Nord, nice.

Easy installation, as the pins are the same as on the SH1106: VCC-GND-SCL-SCA.