AlchemicalAgent

I just picked up Starsector after seeing it on Lemmy. It was described as a cross between Mount & Blade and Daggerfall. They weren't wrong.

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.

Aww dang. I was holding off on getting a T-Deck until Mestastic 2.6 dropped, and would've really preferred an E-Ink version.

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

Woo! Thanks for the mander.xyz shout out. Come for the science memes, stay for the top-tier science discussions.

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.