I just bought a SeedStudio SenseCAP T100-E. I only see 1 node in my area on meshmap.net and doubt i will be able to hit it. I will just have to add myself to the mqtt map to let others know a new node exists in my area.
Get on top of a nearby hill and hang out there for an hour or so. The t1000e has a pretty damn impressive antenna for what it is, but it can’t beat height. If you can see it with your eyes, you should be able to hit it with your node. The trouble is if there’s stuff in the way.
There’s three things that can happen with any radio signal, it goes through something, bounces off something, or is absorbed by something. The more obstructions, the lower your signal. So if you think about a node three blocks away, how many walls does your signal need to go through? In my area that could be 20 houses with 3-4 plaster and cinder block walls it needs to penetrate. If you are on a hill and can see the roof of the house with the other node, that reduces it to maybe 5 walls mine and their signal needs to go through.
There’s someone on the other side of town that has direct line of sight of the entire city and has a great antenna that can hit my node wherever I am, but I can’t reach there’s from inside anywhere. So I have a node I can stick on my car and another in my roof that can relay my messages to them and hit everyone in town by that route. My roof node in turn acts as a relay for anyone in my surrounding neighborhoods who don’t have that height.
Oh yeah, the big ham radio thing is that height is might, especially when dealing with UHF and VHF signals. I am really looking forward to getting the node even if there’s currently nobody that I can talk to with it just because I can put it on MQTT and show that somebody in the area is building up the network. About the highest ham radio frequency I’ve worked with is the 440 megahertz UHF band on 70 centimeters. So this will be higher than I’m used to for amateur radio, but way lower than I’m used to on things like Wi-Fi and such. One thing is for sure, and that at the $40 price point of the T1000E, it doesn’t matter if there’s nobody around to talk to. Because that price is nothing to sneeze at.
Once I can get a sense of how built out the network is and start to contribute to its build out I may very well consider getting my family some of them just for the hell of it. I know, despite all the work, that the software is still pretty early days as well, as it still has the beta label and is only version 2.5.18 from what I can tell.
Also, here’s meshmap of my extended area
And here’s the node map, btw, I’m in Albuquerque so there’s a lot more there because of that
The city about 70 miles to my south has eight nodes on the map and the city about 70 miles to my northeast has about four or five nodes but my area only has one that shows on the map anyway. I am hoping there are more that just don’t want to be included, but I’m not holding my breath put it that way.
Grats. There’s lots of nodes than don’t say “OK to mqtt” and thus don’t show up on the map. Maybe you’ll be less alone than you think.
Lets hope so, but in a city of 45k im not so sure. Guess we shall see.
People come and go, I’ve even picked up a couple nodes from above. In the states a lot of cities have a mqtt channel just add state and city to mqtt settings like;
msh/US/IN/Evansville
Yeah, when i look at meshmap.net i often see that called “root topic”. I don’t know much about MQTTTT. So, when I hear server, I think of like example.com and i dont see anything like that. I know MQTT bridges the nodes to the internet and there’s something about uplink and downlink and I understand the uplink to allow data from your mesh to go to the internet. But is that just to allow different networks to talk with each other over the internet instead of RF? Also, what if you wanted to bridge together two networks that were using different modem settings? So like, city A is using long fast and city B is using short turbo. Is it possible to bridge those together? And final thing, I know that the default hop count is set to three, and that you should not exceed it unless you have a good reason to. But based on what I understand, that means that your message might not actually get to your recipient. If they are more than three hops away, would you even see nodes more than 3 hops away from yourself?
