Smallest that would fit a battery and a Heltec v4.
Live in a fairly small town in the southeast US but the local Amateur Radio club has a Meshtastic radio on a tall building in town and I was immediately able to see ~20 nodes and had 5 people talking in LongFast.
Wish I could have an outdoor pole mounted base station, but living in an apartment makes it hard. It seems to work okay on my 3rd floor windowsill though!
Link to case model: https://www.printables.com/model/1519914-heltec-lora-32-v4v3-pocket-pager-case/files
Okay, you prompted me to look if there’s a local community running meshtastic near me and someone on my street does
now I feel like it I buy a repeater I can actually be doing something.
Also, I’m kinda drunk, and there are worse things I’ve ordered drunk.
Please DO NOT run a REPEATER/ROUTER unless you have access to the roof of a high building. Repeater/router nodes preempt retransmission and thus such a node can hurt the network by not allowing a better positioned node to do the work! Check this from Meshtastic themselves.
TL;DR: if you want to help the network and you don’t have special location and antennas, use the default CLIENT device role.
E: Also if you’re in the GTA, chirp in LongFast, there’s hundreds of us!
I did not order a router.
There’sa local group who said just buy a companion device and get into it before buying a router
I think I misinterpeted. I think you’re talking about router in a coloquial sense, like a network router. I took it as the Meshtastic ROUTER role (their capitalization, not mine). Routers for Meshtastic don’t need to be special devices. It’s just a config setting that sets the role of a device. The default role is CLIENT which already routes and therefore extends the mesh. When you set your device role to ROUTER/REPEATER it starts acting in a different manner where the mesh treats it in specially which is only useful if the device is placed very high, e.g. CN Tower, top of a hill, high radio mast, etc. So I’d order whatever device I like and leave its role as CLIENT, unless I have access to a special location. It’ll help grow the network.
Here’s how the role setting looks on every Meshtastic device:
E: CLIENT_MUTE is useful when you have multiple devices and you don’t want them to retransmit between each other, pointlessly eating hops.
Hey it’s not too pricy to get into.
Also in my (limited) experience the maps online undersold the nodes around me.
Are you automatically included in online maps? Seems like it would mean a little more privacy if not
No. You do need to check a box in the settings usually that marks your packets as “Okay to MQTT” basically saying you’re cool with things getting forwarded to the Internet. Of course theoretically a bad actor could ignore this.
If you have location on, you’ll still appear on maps to other nearby users. (But not on these online maps)
You can disable sending your location, or you can send a less precise location. (You can configure a radius and it randomly puts you within that radius). And actually one of the online maps I’ve seen says that they will not include you if your location is TOO precise.
But it’s also important to remember you’re throwing radio signals out, you can be tracked by that if someone is determined.
Someone really dedicated to finding you could theoretically analyze a series of random points over time and extrapolate the radius and center of the circle, effectively locating your radio
It honestly wouldn’t be that complicated after collecting enough random points
Of course. I was thinking more about a situation where it can be inferred based on things someone has said online about their use of this kind of device and has said about their general location that a particular node is at their home and that is their address (or one of only a few possibilities). Sounds like it’s got that taken care of.