meshcore

I’ve been searching out for hobbies and one thing that’s cropped up recently overlaps a few of my interests.

I’ve fond memories of International Scout Camps where they’d have a radio tent set up (yes that was a past hobby pre and during University, doing radio DJing…)
But it all seemed a bit intimidating for some reason. So much kit you need and then there’s passing tests to get a licence etc. Perhaps something to revisist another time.

But for now, I’ve gotten in to https://meshcore.io

It’s got lots of things that appeal to me, mucking around with microcontrollers, public key cryptography as well as obviously the mysterious world of RF. Then I discovered there’s a whole world of people bolting in onto stats servers with MQTT and of course using it with Home Assistant (something else I’ve lost a lot of time to getting it juuust right).

It’s an easy set up. You can get started with one bit of kit which costs as little as £25ish and it goes from there really. There’s plenty of blogs around how to get started with flashing a device so I don’t think I need to cover that really. For the UK, use the EU/UK Narrow preset. Don’t forget your kit needs to be for 869MHz, the US stuff is at 915 Mhz so you need to check that when you’re buying things.

The first device I bought was a Heltec v3. I set it up as a companion to start off with and encouraged by Ro went off for a drive with it. I’d found an app called MeshMapper which augments the maps you get in the meshcore app showing you not only where repeaters are, but crucially where people have heard them from. I got my first reply on it almost straightaway after I drove up into the hills a bit from our village, picking up a repeater up on Rivington Pike (6B).

We had a busy week visiting Harrogate and then Birmingham so I brought it along with me to see what I could hear with it, but alas didn’t hear very much. I could see that the traffic was going on though through meshrank.net. OK perhaps the little antenna that came with the Heltec v3 isn’t up to much, so after we got back I justified to myself an upgrade already - The Elecrow M1.

Some little differences between the two devices, the M1 comes all put together with a battery, an e-ink screen and a GPS module. The Heltec seems to sort of expect you to add on those things as you wish, which seems fair enough when you don’t really know what you need yet.

After a couple of tests with both set up as companions I found that I wasn’t able to send messages directly between them for much beyond my neighbourhood. So that’s where the world of repeaters comes in.

The topography of meshcore is that there’s basically two roles, companion - what you use to send and receive messages - and repeater - a device that just forwards on traffic that it hears.

At my house I can currently here OK(ish) from another repeater in the south-west of the town, but to do so more reliably and get out to the wider mesh I thought it best to setup the Heltec as a repeater.

Now - I’m just using what I have at the moment and I seem to be able to send out messages most of the time, but at some point I think I’m going to have to delve in a bit deeper. They say the higher the better for RF so I’m thinking about spots to put it that might be better than close to an upstairs window. That said we are already at 140m up so it’s not too bad to start with.

But to do so it’s going to need a few things: Batteries, a replacement antenna, a box to house things in better and whilst we’re there to make it easy to leave out - a power source - solar seems to be the only option really, it’s said to work well if you give it enough batteries to buffer the power a bit.