If I understand correctly line of sight, and height, are key to extending how far you can transmit. What tricks have others used to gain height around their area? I’m kicking around a lot of ideas that range from a flagpole in my backyard to asking the local musicality if I can mount a node on our water tower. What has given you the most success for extending range in a tricky area?
Reach out to your local ham group - almost certainly there is one - and almost more certainly theres a nerd with a giant tower they have access to that would love to talk your ear off and for you to tolerate their antics - and in exchange for that theyll mount your node on their tower
Unfortunately i think i know the local ham guy and his tower is a lower elevation than my back yard. I’d debated asking him if he wanted to move the tower to my house but i’m not interested in being responsible for somebody else’s gear on my lot, at least not gear that expensive.
From what I’ve seen, if a local municipality isn’t down to let you put up a node, people will usually erect a pole at the best spot the legally can. Used radio towers become hot commodities in the right areas
I live just a few blocks from a 1500’ radio and television antenna. I’ve exchanged a few emails with them about mounting a repeater on it, but it would have to meet some fairly brutal requirements and I’m not in a position to pay for that kind of unit at the moment. Maybe someday…
Meanwhile, I live in a hilly area. A repeater on my house would have a limited area. Fortunately, I have a good friend, who is also a Meshtastic user, whose house is the top of the highest ridge. She put my solar repeater on top of her chimney (with standoffs to avoid heat problems), which got the antenna up above pretty much everything.
When we first got our radios we could only see a half-dozen nodes, including ours. The day the repeater went up, that suddenly expanded to over a hundred. Now, as several other repeaters have come up around us, that number has doubled at least twice. And it keeps going up.
Height is might
LOS and height will always be king. My area is very hilly/mountainous. A couple local node operators have surrepitously placed some solar nodes on mountainsides (which is public land); these nodes can reach effectively the entire valley in my city with LOS due to their height and thus carry the vast majority of all mesh traffic.
You cna sometimes complete some edge case connections by upping your antenna gain; going from a 3dbi omni to an 8dbi omni gives you a lot more link budget, at the cost of sacrificing the vertical range of the antenna making it worse in hilly/sloped areas. Antenna gain will never make up for poor positioning though.
I’ve even been toying with the idea of getting some 915mhz Yagi directional antennas and making a PtP out at my parents’ rural property to see if I can get it online with the city mesh 30km away. But i doubt that would work with the hill issues we have- I’d have to sneak a solar node up to a 7600ft mountaintop and then deal with the winter maintenance headaches that entails.
Also, reducing interference helps. Try to locate the node away from power lines or other wireless transmitters that might otherwise generate some RFI and decrease the strength of received messages.
