I've Been Doing It Wrong This Whole Time! Meshtastic Antenna Tuning

boys and girls welcome back to another quick installment of Julian's random projects I'm going to try and get this done in one take you read it right we've been doing it wrong the whole time or at least I have I maybe it was my excitement about the the mesh tastic stuff and Laura and you know nodes and and building all the stuff out and meeting guys in Austin and they're setting up their stuff and like I want I want to I want to play these reindeer games let's go um and I just saw that everyone was buying and utilizing 915 megahertz both the antennas and that was the ISM band that we're all playing in so I de saidd great let me get antennas that are 9:15 I even started tuning stuff you might have seen in some previous uh YouTube video about this I'm tuning antennas for 915 I was very proud of myself I was like dead nuts on I got this uh deep V here at 915 MHz and then I just happened to be on Austin mesh's uh website and looking through some of the documentation for the mesh ttic the mesh fantastic project and I noticed that in the states at least and I'll try to um put a screenshot in here for some of the other other countries uh for their respective uh bands that they're using the default the channel default that everyone's using for mesh tastic and that if you want to talk to your friends and your neighbors and stuff like that's let's all just use the defaults both for fast short and also the channel it's 9006 875 so I me a hair away from just being 9007 you're going to call me you're going to hear me call it 9006 a lot lot um so that's what we're going to do today I've got one of the stock um antennas that come with the a lot of the kits out there or kits that don't have antennas a lot of folks are just buying these cool little stubby guys and they happen to be set for you know often higher in the band um or they're just they're maybe for a different country that you weren't um buying them from or it also could just be that the factory when they when they are uh assembling these things they're just coiling that wire around a shaft and then snipping it off and they're probably just snipping it off based on you know like a pencil Mark somewhere or a Sharpie marker somewhere or the the thing that comes in and cuts it is supposed to be cutting it some um measured length but in in my testing for 906 I've had to add a length of wire to that antenna to make it resonant and that resonance changes when we put on the uh the plastic you see it shifted way over if I take it off it comes back within frame I can see that it's moving to the left now the reason that's happening is because this to make this black it is uh doped with what you know was uh like a ferris material you know there's some actual maybe not explicit conductance but uh to get this black this is not transparent to RF and so that's what we're dealing with this it's not a problem uh we just have to account for it in our measurements here let me snip at this thing and then uh we'll we'll wrap it up all right that's good enough for the girls I go out with uh the wear resident probably closer to 9:08 of course it moves around just there's you know there's things going on in this room so 910 or so uh there's 9007 and we're at 1.12 so 1.1 SWR and that's way better than where it was before it was it was almost like unusable uh before we tuned it and the only bit of uh I almost could have got away with like a little dab of solder might have also brought it really close to being resident didn't need much to bring it in it's a it's a pretty short length of wire that we soldered on top of that remember you can't stretch it out that thing's already coiled up and loaded to a specific length uh the length is still accounted for even though it's going around in a circle grabbing it stretching it's not it might change it some but it's not going to dramatically change where it's resonant you need to solder on a little length of it uh especi or maybe you don't your yours might be yeah I'm trying to convinced myself here your frequency when you look at it on your uh your Nano VNA here it fits lower meaning to the left here on our Spectrum snipping it off making it shorter will move that frequency or where it's resonate will move it to the right and move it up in in uh the the actual frequency mehz so it might be that you got one that was tuned for uh the EU and it's near you know 800 and some odd and you want to walk it this way it's it's done by just snipping off a little bit so that might actually you know you luck out there you're not going to break out the soldering iron so if you're in the states tune this thing for 906 you will get some of the best results at this point I'm getting like 10 miles with these little dongles uh here we've got trees and woods and all sorts of stuff um so that's I'm I'm looking for some areas we a little bit higher up and I'll keep experimenting and keep you guys posted thanks for following along for another quick installment of Julian's random projects if you want to play along at home there's a bunch of Shield links down in the description so feel free to click on those and join us next time as we uh experiment more with this and see if we can get uh some super long distances I'm hanging in there ain't no doubt and I'm hanging tough over and out over and out over and out and [Music] out

Channel: JuliansRandomProject

Views: 4,334

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Id: lE0ZrNij-Ws

Length: 5min 22sec (322 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024