Meshtastic to connect remote villages: Deep in the Amazon

Update

We’ve stumbled upon various legal barriers for setting up nodes in key places, as they’re inside nature reserves. So our team decided to have me visit the place asap to really learn about the territory, leaving the long link to the town for a next phase.

On this first phase we’ll be focusing on installing the local intranets (using Pi4s + OpenWRT router) on each village, and having a LoRa network connecting the 3 villages, so they can at least communicate to each other.

My initial idea is to use TTGO LoRa32 433Mhz (as I remember there’s a problem with T-Beams not waking up after battery discharge?) with DK7ZB yagi atennas that @msws built for the fixed nodes. And also TTGO T-Beams for mobile nodes.

Since we’ll be using Pi4s, the Pine64 dongle mentioned here would be ideal, but probably won’t come out in time. So for now I’ll use USB to connect the Pi and the LoRa32 board, and use the python API and a web UI for users to interact throuh their phones when connected to the access point. Is this ready to go @sachaw?

The geography and vegetation won’t help us much on these links, but they are only ~5Km. For those reasons I choose 433Mhz with the yagi. Yall think this might work?

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