I want to setup a Meshtastic Gateway that would enable my local community mesh to communicate with other meshes outside the community or MQTT servers. This is the purpose of a gateway if I’m not mistaken.
Ours is a rural community with limited cell coverage and lots of potential for agricultural use.
With all that said, I’m really at a loss for info on buying or configuring a gateway.
I have shopped around fairly extensively but the hardware wildly varies in cost and specs.
It appears to me a RAK2245/Raspi combo is what I’m looking for. But Does the gateway need GPS? What is the better choice for an external antenna? What do I need to do to get a gateway setup/configured with the Meshtastic server?
Any info or direction to this info would be much appreciated.
Alas. The current meshtastic codebase is targeted at our “1.0 feature list” described at meshtastic.org. we finished 1.0 in September and it seems to work well for that use case. I.e. it is targeted at small groups of like-minded friends (skiing, hiking, flying, protesting?) Having cheap comms that don’t need internet.
While the current 1.1 feature development should eventually kinda do what you want, it is not yet ready. I’d recommend waiting 3 ish months?
That’s great news!
Do you know if any others like Disaster Radio that currently support what I’m attempting to accomplish? There must be someone out there doing it due to the sheer number of gateways available.
I think due to very limited bandwidth from lora (i.e. at the long range settings we usually use it takes a few seconds to send 60 bytes of data - enough for one short text message or a single GPS position update), it is not a widely used feature (which is why disaster radio has had adoption problems IMO - though they are great folks).
So LORA is great for some applications but its use as a general internet for rural communities is IMO limited. One notable exception is the thread here on providing basic communications for very remote developing villages - but even then, just occasional text messages.
I have no intention other than msg text or sensor data. Not sure what made you think otherwise.
Let me extrapolate.
St Louis is 100 miles away. If there were a Meshtastic gateway there, and here in my rural town, then anyone on either network could communicate with each other as if in the same locality.
I could communicate with family, friends, co-workers, transport drivers, etc. In the event of cellular outage, or any other communication outage other than internet access.