LoRa Mesh

It all began with RTTY

. and never stopped for me. Because I was always less of a talker than a writer, and I was active both on shortwave in radioteletype and on ultra-short waves in AX.25 packet radio. Times have changed in the meantime – but I have rediscovered ‘writing via radio’ for myself – even if it is now more about data transmission than ‘writing’.

LoRa Mesh Communication

This is a method for transmitting data, such as sensor data like temperature, wind, humidity, as well as detailed position information like GPS location, altitude, direction of travel, and speed.

I work with the LoRa process Meshtastic - which can transport sensor data and text messages of up to 200 characters in a "self-connecting" network (meshing). In other words, a new network node immediately integrates itself into existing networks and participates without having to log into the network.

This makes the process ideal not only for experimenting with LoRa, but also for emergency communication – because all network nodes are equal and any node can communicate with any other node within range at any time.

Solar-Node

My solar-driven network-node does contain:

Solar-Panel, 5 Volt, 20 Watt
Housing made on a 3D printer
External antenna for 868 MHz
Battery with 3.7 volts and a capacity of 3 Ah
Solar-Charger board
Network node with Bluetooth (switched off) and LoRa radio transceiver (-27 dB/m = 0.5 Watt PEP)

The whole thing was mounted on a 6-metre-high flagpole at my place, bringing it to a height of 500 metres above sea level.

As already described, the Meshtastic software is used as firmware on the LoRa radio device. Among other things, this offers the advantage that I can control it remotely – via radio – and thus switch off the Bluetooth module. This means that very little power is consumed in the solar node. According to other users of this system, the network node can easily survive long winter nights

Dorfnetz

I would like to set up two more nodes in my village – and another one in the neighbouring village at the foot of the mountain. This will allow me to connect both villages with each other and thus offer the population an effective radio network for village coordination in the event of a crisis or disaster.

Own station

By the way: At home i'm using another simple node, to which i connect via bluetooth with an android tablet. So i can observe, what's going on on the network. At the moment i'm not pretty sure, what i want to do with this node exactl (housing, mounting and so on) so that i use it in it's raw format.

I think, i will convert it also into a solar node and put it outside in front off my window, just to enhance it's distance range.