Store and Forward on Repeater

Hey Guys,

I would like to set up a Meshtastic Network in my Town in Bulgaria. Currently there are no other Nodes then my test Nodes. From my Understanding, the Store & Forward Feature is essential for a Repeater. So Offline Nodes can get messages, that were sent to the Network when the Node was offline.

In the Documentation I found this article here: Store & Forward Module Settings | Meshtastic

And the way the feature works, looks like what I want to have. But… The Article also says, that I need an ESP32 Device for it. But the Problem with an ESP32 Device is the higher power, that the device needs, in comparison to a RAK Wisblock 4631.

Can someone help me out? I thought that the 4631 is a powerfull chip. So I don’t get, why I can’t use the S&F Feature here.

Or are there other Options? Or what are you doing? Are you just waive the S&F Function on the Solar Repeater Nodes?

To be specific, it requires PSRAM (or a Linux device with LoRa radio), which to date only some of the supported ESP32 devices have.

Hm… Yes, I get it… But…
I saw the thread where some one put a lot of effort into building a Solar S&F Node.

But there is a thing, I don’t really understand. Also because this use case is missing in the Diagram in the Docs.

Do I even need a solar powered S&F Node? Won’t it be enough to have a Router running a RAK 4631 Module and directly connected to the RAK low power device an ESP32 Based Node?

So a Client Node connects to a router but instead of getting the Messages from the First router, the client gets the Messages from a second connected router.

Is this going to work? Honestly, I don’t really understand how S&F works and the Docs arn’t really helpful to understand this feature…

Yes, the S&F node just has to be able to receive the messages. Then it can store them, and you can request it from the S&F server again if you are in range of it (can be over multiple hops).