AlchemicalAgent

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

I'm trying to get my home node high enough for LOS to other parts of town. The house unfortunately has a full hip roof, so I can't attach anything without going through the shingles. My current setup is a pole attached to an 8' garden fence. That gets me to about 15' AGL.

Based on the homes around me I need at least 30' of height to clear their roofs. I've given up on trying to get above the trees because they're old Oaks 50'-100' high.

I keep seeing collapsing fiberglass poles online but they're advertised as a temporary setup. Anyone have recommendations for at least a semi-permanent pole or small tower?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Very nice! I like the pager style with clip.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

As a high school biology teacher in Louisiana I really feel the pain of that survey. My district spends a lot of time on evolution, but it only goes so far with the kids if their parents are against it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I'll second this. My 6 dBi antenna was able to hit a plane, but only because it was also 50 miles away. The cone on a 10 dBi would be too narrow even for that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Let us know how it turns out. I'm sure they'll be some signal reduction, but 33cm wavelengths will still be able to escape.

 

My home node made contact with what I think was someone flying by with a RAK module. The GPS put it at a distance of 47 miles and height of 36,000 feet, along the path airlines would take from New Orleans to Houston.

I've had contacts with more distant nodes but this one was able to confirm receipt and I got a valid traceroute back.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39227005

It sure will be nice for them to control all radio spectrum too, since all amateur and open use bands will be valued at 0$ and be immediately sold off to a corporate owner.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I think it's still a valid question if you frame it along the lines of "something useful at protests, but also in everyday peaceful life".

Meshtastic LoRa is worth looking into if you're going to protests with friends/family/cohorts. You can get a waterproof, GPS enabled, credit-card sized module with multi-day battery life and no flashing required for $35 (T1000-E). That's specifically because it can also be used when hiking, going to festivals, or just for fun.

I was just at a Mardi Gras parade and text messages couldn't go through due to network congestion from too many people. With a couple of meshtastic devices our phones could still text each other and see our GPS positions on a map. All with encryption enabled.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Love the idea so much that I tried it. Turns out a url for a babel page is around 2,000 bytes :-(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Same old story of a community-driven site resorting to ads for revenue. After feedback they started a subscription-based version called totalFark that didn't have ads. Then they introduced ads on totalFark as well, but didn't vet their advertisers. So some of the banner ads were running malicious code on users browsers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Love the idea! Kinda like fark.com before they got all shitty.

 

I've been brainstorming ways to get a permanent node on my truck for various reasons. Here's what I have so far:

  • Hard-wired for power. The vehicle battery is pretty large, and I have a solar-maintainer installed with enough power left over to run a node.
  • GPS module for tracking
  • External antenna (915 MHz). I already have cargo racks on the truck bed so plenty of space to attach a mount.

Unfortunately I haven't found much in the way of hardware guides. Initially I figured a 33 cm ham antenna would be perfect but haven't seen much available. For the node itself I was looking at either a heltec tracker or a Wisblock with location module. Anyone suggestions?

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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What Is Natural Science? (www.advancedchemtech.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

New to Mander, a Lemmy instance focused on the natural sciences.

The Science of Cooking

We’re focused on cooking and the science behind how it changes our food. Some chemistry, a little biology, whatever it takes to explore a critical aspect of everyday life.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I'm not sure if this is the right community, maybe Introductions would be better. But I wanted to say my first week here has surpassed any and all expectations I had during signup.

If I hadn't taken the extra time to look at all available instances I may have missed out on having such a cool server as my base of operations for the Fediverse. Love the topics, love the user base, and looking forward to helping it grow.

 
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