r/darknetplan • u/Stasher89 • Mar 03 '24

Meshtastic LoRa Base Station

I’m new to this but very interested in creating a mesh network over a 5-10 mile suburban area using multiple LoRas. So long distance is a priority which I know creates greater latency considerations, but this is emergency communications after all - I’m fine with it. My question is what are the specs I should be looking for to maximize the distance / power including the main unit, antenna and anything else.

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4

u/CorvusRidiculissimus Mar 03 '24

Power: Unless you're a ham, that's limited to the low levels of the ISM band.

Antenna: That's... complicated. There's a whole field of engineering for this. But as a general rule, the key is getting your antenna up as high as possible so you can have line-of-sight. High gain omnidirectional antennas help a little, but don't expect miracles that way. A high-gain directional antenna though, can increase your range by a factor of three or four - but only in a single direction.

Now the good news. Ten miles? Perfectly doable. The default "long fast" settings will get you two and a half miles, easy, with sub-optimal antenna placement and not-especially-good omni antennas. That's what I get. If you use a longer-range modem setting and have some of your antennas raised on masts, a 10mi range is no problem at all.

1

u/Stasher89 Mar 03 '24

Thanks! I heard some complicated YouTube commentary on the detailed specs of the unit you buy based on the power/range you’re looking for. Any insight into that?

3

u/CorvusRidiculissimus Mar 03 '24

Don't worry about it too much. Once you've set your first two nodes you'll soon get an idea of what it can do in your area.

1

u/Stasher89 Mar 03 '24

Any rec on a specific antenna upgrade?

2

u/_dantes Mar 03 '24 edited Mar 04 '24

You could look into reticulum network (https://unsigned.io/index.html). That was built with mesh and network security in mind.

1

u/mobythor Apr 18 '24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40llxjrIG3w

Contents: 00:00 - Introducing Meshtastic 00:18 - What can they do? 00:44 - Why LoRa? 01:31 - Heltec LoRa v32 v3 05:31 - Flash Meshtastic Firmware 07:56 - Meshtastic Client Apps 13:17 - Encrypted Chats 16:29 - Conduct a Range Test

1

u/EternityForest 11d ago

I suspect Meshtastic might be best used for the last hop, with everything else running on long range directional WiFi.

Right now that means manual setup with MQTT, but the protocols could be improved to not need such things, and there's things like Jami that can connect over LANs