Yeah, when mesh utilization gets too high, the mesh starts having issues because radios can’t find an opening to transmit. I’ve seen a lot of the meshtastic subs for certain cities calling for everyone to switch to medium fast when utilization gets high.
I also keep my pocket mode on client-mute because there are usually much better positioned nodes around to repeat traffic, and mine was just adding to the congestion.
Yeah, I was misremembering exactly how APRS worked. I had a higher power mobile in my vehicle set up to digipeat packets from my handheld, but I guess that most mobile/handheld APRS radios are not digipeating. I just liked that with APRS the repeating stations name was appended to the packet, and I also liked that you could specify a path if desired.
Sometimes I am using meshtastic with just a couple of nodes in the middle of nowhere, and it currently works great for that. But at my house I’ve got a rooftop node, and then there is a mountaintop repeater many miles away that the rooftop node can hit, and a static node in FarAwayTown on the other side of the mountain. If I were able to set a path to “hop3” in the first scenario, but change it to “rooftop,mountaintop,FarAwayTown,hop3”, it would allow me to communicate to those in FarAwayTown without bogging down the local mesh. I was pretty stoked that I could create solar meshtastic nodes to stick on a rooftop or nearby mountaintop for less than $20 to extend range, but doing so seems to cause a lot of congestion locally.
Then again, it is likely that I have no idea what I am talking about and need to study up on meshtastic 😆 I’m pretty new to this.
I wonder why Meshtastic didn’t just duplicate APRS design for the most part. The routing in APRS seems far superior
I haven’t heard anything about the discontinuation of the T1000-e, and that would surprise me… It costs about $7 more than their website, but you can buy them from the seeed Amazon store with two-day shipping, at least in the US.
Gotta make it a flip open device for full effect!
I’m showing 850+, but I cheated a bit by taking it on an airplane… many must have been hopping from ground to plane to plane, because I picked up 240 on the opposite side of the US (including 10 in maine, from a flight over Arizona).