I’ve been building and testing an autonomous solar-powered Meshtastic relay node for some time. I was testing ‘stik” on a 12-foot mast on top of a 6-foot deck, but not in an optimum location relative to the other nodes in the area (none particularly close, alas). My goal was always to put it up on a 30-40 foot bamboo shoot.
I did the deed on the 27th, four days ago. I haven’t received a single mesh message (meshage?) since. I did all kinds of testing: I can send messages out, and Repeater Guy has received and answered them. The answers, however, never reach stik, let alone the nodes inside the house. I can send from the house nodes to stik, and I can send from stik to the nodes in the house. I took the portable WisMesh node to Waimea, where it worked fine. To make matters worse, stik doesn’t seem to be charging adequately (though that could have something to do with the weather — the house batteries haven’t been charging very well, either). I tried setting all the nodes’ roles back to ‘client’ but it didn’t help. The problem, clearly, is the location in the bamboo clump.
I was just going to remove stik from its culm, but I realized that I could answer other questions. Part of the problem might be that, unlike the PVC mast I was testing with, the bamboo is not radio inert. The antenna is within half a wavelength of the culm. Or it might just be the rest of the dense clump of bamboo interfering in just the wrong way. We are, after all, in a rural and sparsely node-populated region, and the bamboo could block all available nodes just by taking out a pie slice of visible terrain.
I think next time it’s reasonably dry (ha!), I’m going to cut the culm near its base (don’t worry; there’s plenty more where that came from) and see if it works if I prop it up away from other vegetation, or if the presence of the bamboo shoot itself is the problem. If that fails, then it’s back to the PVC mast which I’ll try to mount in a better place than where I had it for testing.
—2p
PS. Happy Halloween! 🎃