I had 5 of these T-beams out in the field. After flashing the 5 with the same firmware and only changing the dire things like region, owner names, time out seconds to max and broadcast GPS time to 30 sec. All channels and PSK are default. All this was set one by one with command line and not a device. Only 3 were connected to devices and the other 2 were just being carried. I get 5 different results. Some show up on one, the rest on the others. No location are the same on any map. This was all done in about a 10 acre area. Line of sight was 100% of the time. Moved to other locations around the state and some t-beams moved others didn’t. Some showed they were 77mi away on one device and 23mi away in the opposite direction on another device. The ones that were on devices were on iPhones running the current meshtastic Version. Some GPS chips are the 6M and some are the M8N. Any ideas?
Can it actually be set to 30 second update interval? Not sure if it’s different in the firmware you are running but I though the fastest it could be set to update was a little over every 5 minutes.
Thanks for the replies. So it’s the update interval that is the 30 sec the broadcast to mesh is 60 sec. The firmware was the latest as of Sunday morning. The mesh-flasher loaded it and installed it.
What firmware version is in the top right corner of the screen on your tbeam? The app is our alpha preview version and those firmware versions don’t work with the flasher yet.
Ok, that’s great to know thanks so much. So what would I do in order to get them to all function the same way? Would it work better if I flash with an older firmware version or do I stop updating the app in TestFlight till firmware catches up?
This time we didn’t go so crazy and boondock them. We took them to a very small fair. Lots of obstructions but it was the equivlent to a 2 lane highway about 1/4 mile. So i downgraded the apps to the 1.2 and same thing. All devices show different nodes and locations. Any other ideas?
I kind of thought channel issue so I have added a secondary. Changed channel name and number. I seen other posts about adding a second channel can cause problems. This is all default. I flashed it and changed the sleep time, owner name and cranked up the GPS broadcast. The PSK, channel name, channel number is default.
Has each device sent a message while in the presence of the other?
What I mean is have nodes 2 - 5 sent a message while in range of node 1. And Node 2 sent a message while in range of 1 and 3 - 5?
If you have a new node and just turn it on it will not populate each of the other devices on the list until you send a message with them at least once.
That’s a great theory! I haven’t sent any messages with them. The picture I sent before, the phone with the yellow case doesn’t have any nodes on the screen. Send that node yellow case node a message and it should work…. I like it. I like this project. I’ve been into radio both professionally and geek for 25 years. I’ve learned a lot the past 6 months I’ve had these things. You guys are great with the help. I’ll let you know. I was about to put them on eBay.
I mention channel utilization because I had an experience changing setting (I believe with gps update intervals) where something got messed up and seemed to go rouge. Channel utilization was regularly hitting > 50% and at this point data gets throttled. User experience was very poor at that point. I factory reset the devices and started fresh (left gps update interval alone). Worked fine since. Just putting this out there as a data point. Remember to check channel utilization if things seem amiss.
You guys are great. Both you kb9nate and loodydo have brought up great topics. I thought I wrapped my head around this pretty good but I learned something new here. Ponder this. If I were to ch-set id 1212 --ch-index 0 would I be the only person utilizing said channel? Would this cut out other packs from other nodes?
I have noticed that some users, myself included, have been increasing the update interval (sometimes far too high for the default channel) to aid in exploring range and evaluating mesh performance.
Before I had any experience with meshtastic and LoRa I had my 5 nodes set to send messages every minute which quickly bump the channel utilization into unstable levels.
This discrete-event simulation is a great way to see how frequent updates can really cloud a mesh-based network. Smart position broadcast is the right solution for real world use and the range test plugin is best for testing.
