I am trying to set up a Mesh. I have 6 solar powered devices that I want to use as repeaters. My understanding is that, I don’t need to add our private channel onto them. Rather, I have the modem settings as LONG_FAST. Our private channel is also LONG_FAST.
I can’t seem to figure out if packets are being repeated. I have tried to look at the hop_limit but I still see 3 on received packets. Is there a way to test this. My goal is to deploy them on mountains using a drone so I need to make sure they work first.
your radios must share the main LoRa configs: region (frequency plan), modem settings/preset and channel number (channel_num).
traceroute shows packets going through repeaters but your local node and the target can’t be within each others LoRa range (ie. communicate directly). you can add distance, attenuators and/or lower TX power for that.
Another way to test whether the settings are correct is to turn off the node you want to send to. Then using the Android or Apple apps, you send a direct message to that node. If the repeater’s settings are correct, you will still get an acknowledgment when the repeater rebroadcasts (even if it cannot decrypt the packet). In the Android app this acknowledgment is a cloud with check mark (it will be a person with check mark when the node you wanted to send to acknowledged it), in the Apple apps it will say “Implicit Ack by another node” (it will say “Acknowledged” when you received it from the intended node).