Possible to Connect Bewteen Cities?

Builds / Use Cases
1

I’m new to Meshtastic and radio in general, so please bear with me.

I currently live in a city about 160km away from my brother and I want to know what it would take to connect with him. I know I can connect to the MQTT network, but I’d like to do it through LoRa. There are many nodes in his city, and a few scattered in between his city and mine. The cities are the same elevation with completely flat prairie in between.

I know this would be a large undertaking, but I want to know what it would take. I’m interested in setting up a repeater either on my roof or in a tree in my yard. At the very least I’d like to grow the network in my city.

Am I naive for thinking this is possible and/or practical? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

2

possible if you get line of sight.

if you place a node 100m high it can “see” around 35km in each direction.
so around 60km between two nodes each 100m high.
so you would need about 3 routers in perfect position, each 100m above ground.

to get a router to “see” 100km in each direction, it would have to be about 1000m above ground.

if can get 50m above ground , you can “see” 25km. the number of necessary nodes can be calculated :wink:
20m above ground makes 15km sight.

1 Like
3

Ok thank you very much for this. I completely forgot about curvature of the earth :person_facepalming:

Now I understand why some people are able to get such far range, because they’re up so high.

I will do some more research to see if there are any places in between where it makes sense to put a few nodes to maximize their range.

I’ll have to wait for more nodes to arrive from China but I’ll update once I make some progress.

Thanks!