Bernd's Weblog

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.

Had to figure out, that from 1.0 there were changes in the used hardware: PSU AXP192 and SX1276. But the main problem: After flashing a firmware there were GPS errors.

The Lilygo T-beam uses a U-blox GPS N6M for GPS. A module-reset via https://github.com/richonguzman/TTGO_T_BEAM_GPS_RESET did work and the errors disappeared. But: The T-beams were now able to get the time via GPS (therefor one sat is enough) but position data were rarely seen, also after getting a fix, modules stopped gps data again.

Finally I found https://github.com/eriktheV-king/TTGO_T-beam_GPS-reset and the (hard) factory reset seems to work.

Btw: The green T-beam in the middle has the firmware by OE5BPA, nice for fixing, as it shows the amount of received sats.