I’m a programming and lora, mesh, esp32 noob. Thanks to everyone for contributions in this forum that have helped me so far.
I have 4 T beams and have them all flashed to the latest firmware. I have also tried ATAK. Here’s my experience so far in the 48 hours I’ve been using the boards:
I have found 4km to be about the maximum reliable connection on flat ground in urban and country environments. I did increase this to 11km between nodes by elevating a repeater (line of sight node to repeater using factory omni on 923MHz, Long & Slow).
I had ATAK set up and working for a period of time but found it unreliable in terms of connectivity despite sharing the same channels. I like the functionality of ATAK as an outdoorsman and ex military so will keep watching both meshtastic and ATAK for developments.
I found ATAK turned off the GPS on the boards. No idea how, but despite reverting to meshtastic to try and reflash and using default settings I could not get the satellites back. This required me to follow the post that many others seems to have used which requires a reflash of the board through the Arduino IDE (using the sketch on one of the posts here) followed by reflash of meshtastic. This worked for me on all 4 boards, although one board required a second reflash through the IDE before it finally came back.
I am working through the sleep issue when phone is connected to a board. I have much more to learn with all the settings.
I live in a wide valley so although I have small 160mA 6V panels and charger circuit, I will get some bigger boards (probably ~1W) before placing my repeaters out on either side of the valley semi-permanently. My repeater ran for 48 hours on a single 18650.
I have run viewshed modelling where I live and I think I can have full coverage of our valley from two repeater nodes. I will be looking to do some extreme range testing at some point as we have several high mountain peaks with amazing viewshed. Some poor T beam will find itself up there all alone in the future “just to see”.
So anyway, thanks again, this is all very interesting and fun stuff so thanks to all contributors.
Hi there, and sorry for the delay in responding to your question. I think what I am seeing is that if one of my T Beams in the mesh is set as a router, the radio I connect my phone to drops into sleep mode and I am unable to send messages from the app through the connected board.
I am using the latest firmware (1.2.59) and flasher. The reason I think this is causing a sleeping problem is because I had all 4 of my boards happily meshed and talking this morning with none of the boards set to be a router. Then, I set one to be a router in the device settings and saved it, then my phone’s paired board reports in the android app that is it “connected but sleeping”. I am unable to send messages from the app, and the message does not send at anytime even if the board is woken or reset using the button.
So I removed the router setting from the board I had applied it to and my phone’s radio woke up and reverted to its normal behaviour, including sending messages. While it was showing “connected but sleeping” in the android app, the actual board was awake and detected by the relay board the whole time despite not being usable from the app on the phone it was connected to.
Thanks Garth, the router setting was active on a dedicated router board, not the board my phone was connected to, although now that you mention it, I wonder if somehow that setting carried over as I was updating the boards… I’ll continue to monitor…
Realworld tested my boards tonight on a hunting trip. I placed a board on the roadside on the way to the hunting area and then used two to test connectivity while I hunted. Sadly I ended up losing the one I was carrying when I had to fight through some tough bush to try and locate a deer we had shot.
Thankfully I took screenshots of its coordinates and location on the map so I’ll go back and find it tomorrow. But it is there somewhere in the bush and still reporting its position which I lost at 48km on the drive home (not line of sight, but close).
This is not “put it on a mountain and point a yagi at the other node” kinda testing. This was the board in a pocket or a pouch with its factory omni kinda testing. And it worked well. I have better antenna coming and will get the radios into cases for field use.
I’m unsure as I’m too far away at present. But I’ll be taking another node and my phone back up today to find it and will report back. Previously I had 48 hours from a node I placed out in the field so I imagine this one will still be going after a single night.
Well that was quite the Sunday afternoon adventure.
Sure enough the lost board was still running today but on arriving back at my hunting area and reconnecting to the mesh I could see the board was down to 5% battery. I navigated back down the ridge to the general area the board was lost in and began searching for it. You will see in the pictures it was not easy country to navigate in, and given I was navigating in the dark last night using a head torch it was difficult to retrace exact steps.
So I used a combination of meshtastic map and exported waypoints from meshtastic into an android app called Backcountry Navigator. It became a very frustrating process as I would use the GPS updates from the lost board and search the area each time it updated. This was fruitless and the battery level after an hour had reduced down to 2%. Time was short.
I had to change the way I was operating before the lost board died completely. So I sat down and started capturing the waypoints into backcountry navigator each time it refreshed. This approach allowed me to “bracket” the search area and before long I had several repeated points in a triangle and two outliers which I discarded. The reports were starting to become more ad-hoc so I suspected the board had died and would turn on again as the battery voltage recovered. Realising this I sent one last message into the mesh with my contact details if found. However, this was not needed. In less than five minutes of searching within my triangle, I had scoured the undergrowth and found the lost board with 0% battery and my “if found please call XXXX” message on the screen.
A good learning experience, and you will see the picture attached of how I found the board - upside down with its antenna folded and on the ground! and it was still able to ping its location out to over 20km…
