Meshtastic implementation 
Re-posted from Secure Scuttlebutt. Check First post on community-servers, or the full thread .
Balaio elders drawing a map of their territory
As with most implementations, we start off by holding a community-wide assembly, where we first introduce the idea o autonomy in communication and information infrastructures, and why that’s relevant for them. I asked the elders to draw a map of their territory, and did a beautiful job at it.
Balaio map with sticky notes symbolising LoRa mesh nodes
To my surprise the original plan for the Lora network was targeting the wrong village. It turns out the Balaio village was 13Km away from the hilltop, much further then expected.
The hill at the middle of the territory is called Morro dos Seis Lagos (Six Lakes Hill) and it’s theoretically a national park under the control of ICMBio. So the plan for my visit was to install the community-servers and show how the LoRa network works so that the communities could ask for permission to install a node at the hilltop.
When the villagers realised how simple a LoRa node is and the huge positive impact it could bring, they decided we should just go for it even without any approval.
Young Balaio men opening up the river path with a chainsaw
Together with some of the youth who had experience hiking the hill we came up with a plan on where and how to place the LoRa node. Each of the 3 villages that were benefiting from the project sent representatives. Me and the boys from Balaio and Ya Mirim villages went by boat, while the guys from Parintins went by foot cutting thru the forest and met us at the base of the hill.
Since we weren’t prepared for the installation, I had to recover an old solar panel. It was large and heavy, but would hopefully produce enough energy to keep the radio alive.
Our guides got a bit lost and we miscalculated the trail, so we walked in circles for an additional 3 hours in the jungle, and that’s when the huge panel proved to be a big hassle.
But we finally managed to find a good campsite and the highest part of highest hill in the territory. Turns out none of them had been there before, and they weren’t aware of anyone who had. Felt like true explorers.
Balaio men at the top of the tree fixing the solar panel and LoRa node
The guys from Parintins weren’t prepared for camping, so they left at nightfall. Can’t imagine them cutting back thru the jungle at night, but they made it back safely. We camped next to a beautiful lake, ate some of the dried fish and cassava flour we had and told stories of some of the mythical creatures of the forest. We slept in our hammocks and I confess being a bit afraid of the jaguars, but soon fell asleep.
We went back to the highest spot early morning. They cut the branches of the highest tree and fixed the panel. They fixed the Lora node to a wooden pole and fixed the pole to the tree as well, so it stood higher then any tree.
Very quickly we were able to get signal from the most distant village 13Km away, so the mission was a success 
Our party of explorers right before descending the hill
We had nothing left to eat besides cassava flour, which they put in water. They call that Chibé. Not very delicious, but enough to give us energy for the trip back.
Checking for LoRa singal on way back thru the river
The ride back was pretty smooth and all we talked about was food. Wasn’t able to signal from the hill node as there was huge blind-spot until very close to the village.
When we arrived, an angry Yanomami came to recover the boat. Turns out the boat we had taken wasn’t from anyone they knew. Despite him looking really angry, it seems they have good relations and nothing happened.
The noodles with chicken we had afterwards was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life.
LoRa 915Mhz network coverage simulation made with RadioMobile with the villages to be connected and the first Meshtastic message between villages
The simulation which I only ran after the visit shows that the Balaio village isn’t so great for reception. But we manged to establish communication between the villages. The moment me and Adelina were able to exchange message we felt we accomplished something very important.
I had taken only 5 Lora nodes and unfortunately one of them malfunctioned. I had to take the node from the Balaio village down from the roof so that it could be used with a phone. Despite the community-servers running Meshtastic-web, it wasn’t able to store messages, so conversation logs were never kept.
The network was compromised by this malfunctioning node.
Conclusion
This experiment was the closest we came to successfully using LoRa to connect distant villages. Unfortunately we were just one node short.
I’ll hopefully be visiting Balaio again early 2022, so we’ve already acquired more LoRa nodes and created a simple pub/bot which posts Meshtastic messages to SSB.
Setting up LoRa networks to connect remote villages have proved to be challenging, but we’ve advanced quite a lot in making this technology usable and accessible. Its low financial cost makes this very attractive to many isolated villages, so hopefully we’ll continue trailing this path in the future.