I’m trying to improve my connectivity with the Meshtastic network on the island. Meshtastic relies on a number of small, inexpensive LoRa (long-range) radios to create a network that can carry small amounts of data (such as text messages) when there is no internet or cellphone service. Essentially, each radio relays the messages it sees to all the others in the vicinity, creating a mesh network that can cover large geographic areas.
I first tried making this work, there simply was nobody around the area using Meshtastic. I was like a kid who got a single walkie-talkie for Christmas; not much fun if there’s nobody to talk to. That was almost two years ago. Then last summer, I tried again and discovered that the number of Meshtastic nodes in my neighborhood had skyrocketed.
Even with the increased number of “nearby” nodes, it was still challenging to communicate. A node inside my house could barely reach any others, and those only intermittently. I could place a node outside, but not very far outside as I had to get power to it and connect to it via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), whose range is quite limited. I hung a node outside my window, and it worked just well enough to be tantalizing.
My plan has always been to build nodes that were solar powered, autonomous, in weather-resistant enclosures so that they could be scattered around the mountain and improve connectivity neighborhood-wide and provide an off-grid communications network. I took one of my $15 LoRa radios and put it inside a $10 solar yard light, using the latter’s solar panel, battery, and weatherproof enclosure. I hoisted this up on a PVC mast where it should have had fairly good coverage and plenty of sunshine. I designated that a “client_base” node, so any nodes I had inside the house would connect to it and thence to the rest of the mesh network. It did far better than the node taped to the window, but it was always just a test setup. My real goal was to attach the client_base (named “stik”) to a 40’ or so culm of giant bamboo on one of the higher spots on the property. Adding 50’ to the node’s elevation should have made it awesome. I hoisted it up on the bamboo on 27-Oct and…
I haven’t received a message from the mesh since. Repeater Guy tells me that a couple of messages I sent made it out, but I never got his replies. There’s not a lot of general traffic on the mesh, but several folks have bots that send out weather reports and there are lots of “good morning,” “good night,” “there’s an accident on the belt road,” and “can anybody hear me?” types of messages, and I was getting zilch.
I could send DM’s to stik and stik could send them to my inside nodes. stik claimed to be communicating with a few nearby nodes. But something wasn’t working.
I was going to revert to my PVC mast, but there was a question I wanted to answer. Was the problem that stik was buried in a dense clump of giant bamboo, or was the problem that using a bamboo culm as a mask de-tunes the antenna enough to render it non-functional? Unlike a PVC pipe, a live bamboo culm has a lot of water in it and could well interfere with radio. So I cut down the culm (there are many more):
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work lying on the ground. I did give it 24 hours, as it takes time for a relaying node to make connections with other nodes in the vicinity. Then I tried lifting it upright to lean against a large, ancient sugi pine tree. I had always wondered why it took so many US Marines to lift that flag on Iwo Jima:
It turned out to be something I couldn’t do myself. Nonetheless, I tried the node again with it partway in the air, resting in a fruit tree.
Still nothing. I enlisted the aid of HA, and we were able to get stik to the full height and… still nothing.
At this point, I have to tentatively conclude that the presence of the bamboo as a mast just interferes too much with the operation of the node’s antenna, though it remains possible that the electronics were damaged during the move to the bamboo. I loved the bamboo idea, as there are many stands of bamboo I could have recruited for living relay masts around the ‘hood. After two gorgeous days, we had another rainy (4.75”) day today. Once it dries out a bit, I’ll go back to using a PVC mast, but I’ll put it in a more favorable spot than the one I’d used for testing.
—2p
Iwo Jima memorial photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash