I’ve been lurking a while, and been interested in the topic of LoRa communications for even longer, but decided to make an account after realizing how anti-fragile this community and project is.
From what I’ve gathered, there’s diminishing returns on bitrate/packet size with the number of ‘hops’ involved in a network, 3 being a good number as the default. I also understand that ‘routers’ and ‘nodes’ need to be able to decrypt messages (essentially be on the same channel?) in order to retransmit messages along. (Until v1.5 is out possibly?)
My use case is in a low-density populated, yet large area with little to no grid connections or cell service for most people. Getting a short message from south to north over a distance of 10-15mi, would peter out quickly with the 3-hop limit, yet anything more than 3 hops is overkill for the average node.
My thought is, if the stationary solar powered routers in prime locations, visible to each other, could override the hop limit with their OWN limit, you could greatly expand the range. Basically, upon receiving a packet the router would then rebroadcast the original packet -1 hop, and then rebroadcast the same thing ‘bracketed’ inside of another packet to be picked up by other routers looking specifically for that format.
Broadcast 1: (packet+hoplimit3-1)
Broadcast 2: [Routerpacket(packet+hoplimit3-1)hoplimit3]
Anyways, great job guys. I’m going to be picking up a few TTGOs and giving some to friends. Finally, a promising mesh communications project!