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.
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.
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.
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.
Very nice! I like the pager style with clip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love the idea so much that I tried it. Turns out a url for a babel page is around 2,000 bytes :-(
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.
That sounds pretty great. I'll have to look at local options. Biggest issue for me would be if I have a flagpole I'd want to put a flag on it π.