Smallest that would fit a battery and a Heltec v4.
Live in a fairly small town in the southeast US but the local Amateur Radio club has a Meshtastic radio on a tall building in town and I was immediately able to see ~20 nodes and had 5 people talking in LongFast.
Wish I could have an outdoor pole mounted base station, but living in an apartment makes it hard. It seems to work okay on my 3rd floor windowsill though!
Link to case model: https://www.printables.com/model/1519914-heltec-lora-32-v4v3-pocket-pager-case/files
Radio club has a Meshtastic radio on a tall building in town and I was immediately able to see ~20 nodes and had 5 people talking in LongFast.
You lucky sod! In Toronto we had someone install a node on CN Tower. It was a miracle. We talking from one end of GTA to the other, a 50km span, became 1-2 hops, down from 5-6. And then two days later it disappeared. The person who installed it disappeared from the Discord. Accounts deleted. No further communication. I assume something went wrong with his employer and whoever manages the CN Tower radio installations.
Bummer! But I’m talking like 50ft here lol not CN tower. That thing is insane, I’ve been up there.
Okay, you prompted me to look if there’s a local community running meshtastic near me and someone on my street does
now I feel like it I buy a repeater I can actually be doing something.
Also, I’m kinda drunk, and there are worse things I’ve ordered drunk.
Please DO NOT run a REPEATER/ROUTER unless you have access to the roof of a high building. Repeater/router nodes preempt retransmission and thus such a node can hurt the network by not allowing a better positioned node to do the work! Check this from Meshtastic themselves.
TL;DR: if you want to help the network and you don’t have special location and antennas, use the default CLIENT device role.
E: Also if you’re in the GTA, chirp in LongFast, there’s hundreds of us!
I did not order a router.
There’sa local group who said just buy a companion device and get into it before buying a router
I think I misinterpeted. I think you’re talking about router in a coloquial sense, like a network router. I took it as the Meshtastic ROUTER role (their capitalization, not mine). Routers for Meshtastic don’t need to be special devices. It’s just a config setting that sets the role of a device. The default role is CLIENT which already routes and therefore extends the mesh. When you set your device role to ROUTER/REPEATER it starts acting in a different manner where the mesh treats it in specially which is only useful if the device is placed very high, e.g. CN Tower, top of a hill, high radio mast, etc. So I’d order whatever device I like and leave its role as CLIENT, unless I have access to a special location. It’ll help grow the network.
Here’s how the role setting looks on every Meshtastic device:
E: CLIENT_MUTE is useful when you have multiple devices and you don’t want them to retransmit between each other, pointlessly eating hops.
Ah, I did not order a repeater
Hey it’s not too pricy to get into.
Also in my (limited) experience the maps online undersold the nodes around me.
Are you automatically included in online maps? Seems like it would mean a little more privacy if not
No. You do need to check a box in the settings usually that marks your packets as “Okay to MQTT” basically saying you’re cool with things getting forwarded to the Internet. Of course theoretically a bad actor could ignore this.
If you have location on, you’ll still appear on maps to other nearby users. (But not on these online maps)
You can disable sending your location, or you can send a less precise location. (You can configure a radius and it randomly puts you within that radius). And actually one of the online maps I’ve seen says that they will not include you if your location is TOO precise.
But it’s also important to remember you’re throwing radio signals out, you can be tracked by that if someone is determined.
Someone really dedicated to finding you could theoretically analyze a series of random points over time and extrapolate the radius and center of the circle, effectively locating your radio
It honestly wouldn’t be that complicated after collecting enough random points
But it’s also important to remember you’re throwing radio signals out, you can be tracked by that if someone is determined.
Of course. I was thinking more about a situation where it can be inferred based on things someone has said online about their use of this kind of device and has said about their general location that a particular node is at their home and that is their address (or one of only a few possibilities). Sounds like it’s got that taken care of.
Wow this is cool,. New to meshtastic, you popped up in my feed. I have questions.
- is this voice or text?
- looks like you can get pretty inexpensive kits on Amazon for about $30. Do I have to have anything else to get started? Base station required?
- website looks like it’s got some great documentation with a lot of depth, but is there like a quick top level overview that helps me understand what this does/how it works?
Edits because I’ve sort of answered some of my questions:
- text, and this device sends the text to your phone which explains why there are so few buttons/input options on it.
- https://youtu.be/oAo2sb8LpFc This was a great video recently posted in this community that was a great overview for me.
I’m still curious about the base station.
Yeah the device connects to your phone. But you can also get devices you can type on directly.
A base station? No, you just need one radio. It’s a mesh network. Now it’s pretty common for people involved in this to get two radios and mount one on their roof/on a tower/up a hill nearby - then they’ll have a second device they keep near them. This gives you excellent coverage at all times, especially when you’re indoors. These are low powered radios, even if the signal can go many miles in ideal conditions. But in a healthy mesh someone nearby enough could have a high up node, negating the need for you to have one.
Look! A penny!
Damn inflation
So adorable! I love it.
Looks really cool
