The one with a bunch of golden lab dogs dressed in lab coats? It’s still hanging on my fridge.

That makes sense. When I zoomed in and saw how they labeled auditory processing I was suspicious.

Only based on what the listed specs are (11-12 mm). They don’t ship until April 25th.

I ordered a 5,000 mAh to try out. It saves me from building something similar myself. Prototyping wireless charging is hard enough as it is without taking radio interference into account.

That’s what I’m thinking too. Why have a PoGo port if you don’t plan on waterproofing. I already have silicone plugs for USB-C ports.

Just played through the tutorial. Looks and plays great.

True. Honestly most of the issues in my area are LOS. We have maybe a dozen nodes on LongFast in my town but no stable connections. Working on getting my own node up higher, but we’ll see.

I converted a spare node toward your effort! All my other nodes are currently LongFast though. My area is just too sparse for anything else right now.

If it’s even close to M&B or Daggerfall my upcoming summer break is in trouble.

I think for now I’ve settled on a roof tripod. Specifically, the TRT60 from ROHN. It’ll get me an extra 10 feet off the roof without guys and still be upgradable for later.

That really depends on the nodes you have around you. If everyone is sitting in their houses with small Keychain nodes your mesh will never reach more than a few miles. But if you add a few key nodes in high places with good antenna then each hop of the mesh can easily reach 10+ miles. Even with the default 3-hop limit I’ve hit a town 60 miles away from me.

The largest limitation with a lot of nodes is channel congestion. Despite the name, LongFast is still pretty slow. The more nodes you have the longer channels stay active when a message is sent. Not to mention all the telemetry packets being sent about.

My local area is nowhere near populated enough to cause an issue, but I’ve seen many recommendations that switching to ShortFast is the way to go when you have enough node density. It’s around 10x faster so it can handle more traffic. While range is smaller the higher number of nodes in your area would help offset the drawbacks.

The issue then is you’re no longer on the default setting of all factory meshtastic devices so no one visiting your area would be able to see your mesh. The only way around this I know of is if you’re putting key locations on the mqtt meshmap where it shows your device’s default channel. Or a smaller mesh still running LongFast that periodically broadcasts something like “This area runs ShortFast, come join us!”

Honestly it’s just reluctance on my part. It’s a brand new roof and I was trying to avoid drilling in it. But if I can mount a tripod on the peak it’ll get me an extra 15’ of height on top of whatever pole I use.

I’d love a proper tower. I’m also trying to get back into HAM after a 30-year break but I just don’t have the funds at through moment 😅

Thanks! Definitely going to check them out. Most people here attach antennas to their chimney. Unfortunately the chimney on my house was removed during the last shingle job so I have no mount points left.

That sounds pretty great. I’ll have to look at local options. Biggest issue for me would be if I have a flagpole I’d want to put a flag on it 😆.

This is just a hypothetical, but have you compared the SNR of your local nodes throughout the day? It could be that your local noise floor gets lower at certain times and allows you pick up further signals.

I’ve seen similar results where I get nodes from a town about 100 km away, but only around 8 PM. My local nodes SNR around that time is ~4 dBi higher than normal.

If this is for emergency preparation you may as well leave them up permanently. Even if you don’t want them turned on all the time you could set it up to automatically start on battery power when the mains power drops during storms.

Got another contact last night in a plane at 90.1 miles, then got a relay through them to a neighboring state at 347 miles.

That’s true. The biggest thing I’d be worried about is feature creep. If you try to be everything you won’t effectively be anything. I’m glad to see meshtastic is making improvements to routing and DMs in the new version. Hopefully they just continue to refine and not bloat.

Very nice! I like the pager style with clip.