Yesterday turned out to be an interesting and eventful Mother’s Day (those on Discord are already aware, as the # General channel exploded yesterday morning).
Through a group effort we were able to hit a new Meshtastic range record.
In a sleepy little Canadian town of Carbon AB: Rook, Starwatcher and CVR (as they identify on Discord) launched their balloon carrying some cool gadgets including a Meshtastic router node. I believe it was a TBEAM unit, but I won’t go into too much detail, as I don’t want to steal their thunder, and hopefully we will get details and pictures here later. But I will show one of their teaser pics:
A number of us already have a pretty sizable mesh going in the Calgary area and were monitoring it. Realizing I was farthest south and was already getting a direct line of sight signal of 145km, I hopped into my vehicle and headed even farther south. Since the balloon was slowly moving along a SW route, the distance was increasing at a slower pace as I was driving and trying to increase the gap. Slowly the node distance numbers increased until eventually it hit 167km.
Unfortunately, I hit a valley, and as I was trying to get some traceroute data, I drove down the road forgetting I had left my node on my roof, and it decided it wanted to follow in the balloon’s footsteps and take flight. As it tumbled down the highway, it damaged the antenna:
I’m sort of glad this happened, because even with the broken antenna, even with the awful signal now, I was still able to get an occasional ping and hit 171km.
This is a good example of how resilient and forgiving not only LoRa but the Meshtastic software is (kudos to our excellent devs).
The little Chevy Tracker I was in, while great for reaching those hard to reach mountain areas, does not do well in strong highway crosswinds. And it was indeed a very blustery day. As I headed back, things didn’t feel complete. So when I returned home, I grabbed my backup T-BEAM, and a vehicle better suited for a long Southern Prairies drive. At that time the balloon had caught up distance and was just a little under a 100km away. However to add to this, the balloon had run into an issue and its altitude was decreasing. So now it was a race against time. This time I took a different route which was the most direct. I kept an eye on the distance slowly increasing again. Sometimes it was a bit of hesitation as I’d dip into a deep valley and momentarily lose signal and not see any increase, as well as seeing the balloon altitude gradually decrease from 28km all the way down to 9.7km (which is still over a good 30,000ft).
However as I entered the outskirts of Cardston, Alberta, I finally saw the Meshtastic node list show the VE6TS9 balloon node read 200km. I drove a bit longer to try and find a good spot to gather the proper data with a final distance reading of 206km:
Tracking Route and Final Distance Reading:
Signal Information:
Nodes Involved:
Direct TraceRoute to confirm no other hops:
Talking to the balloon:
Ground T-BEAM node location:
It’s a lovely day for a distance reading:
Meshtastic Software/Firmware was 2.1.10
T-BEAM is using the stock omni antenna and channel settings set to LongFast
TLDR: Meshtastic signal distance has hit 206km
While I was just at the right place at the right time, the real heros are our devs and the balloon team. Congratulations on such a great achievement! Hopefully we can see more info from them soon on their side.