Meshtastic use case - Communication through metal walls

Builds / Use Cases
1

This probably will sound odd, but I’m exploring LoRa and Meshtastic for use on a cruise ship in late 2022. My friend and I want to be able to communicate so we can find each other and whatnot. In the past, we’ve used walkie talkies and an onboard ship app and both were very lacking.

The walkies had distance issues, the app was a joke that never let you know when someone sent a message. I found LoRa through a rabbit hole of some sort that evenutally lead me here. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research but my use case seems very specific.

I plan on using 3 devices, 2 portable and one left in the room to act as a router. Our room is on the first passenger deck, midship. I know that line of sight is paramount but I was hoping through some decent antennas I could make it work.

Some stats of the ship. Length 936 ft. Width 105.8 ft. 10 indoor decks, about 13 foot tall.

I was hoping some of the more experienced uses on the forum could help me figure this out.

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I bet it is surprisingly good, I did a bunch of testing in my old neighborhood and could easily maintain a signal through multiple buildings Lora does better through dense buildings and forests that I had expected.

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3

Thanks for replying.

I’ve got 2 of the preloaded TTGO T-Beams on the way, so I’m gonna try to do some testing myself. Worst case scenario, I just repurpose the devices for something else.

4

I have not had any experience going through steel walls but I do have a metal shed at the back of my property that causes any connection I have to wifi, ble and cell service to drop but LoRa works fine.

If you find its on the edge you can increase the link budget by narrowing the channel bandwidth, this should be okay as you will only have a max of 3 nodes messages will just be slower.

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