LoRa Meshtastic Range Test, Portable Relay & Your Questions - Off-Grid Communication

how's it going everybody i'm josh ki6naz last week i posted a video about meshtastic using lora devices long range devices and that video kind of exploded and it had a ton of questions that you guys obviously want to know more about so today i'm going to try and answer a couple of major questions and then just take some of your comments and try and work through them i think that's going to be a lot of fun so let's get started [Music] okay so the first thing we have to cover is the range of these lora communicators i'm using t-beam communicators there are multiple devices that work laura and again laura long range proprietary low power wide area network modulation technique people ask what is the range of this modulation technique well it's line of sight and let's let's chew on that a little bit for those that are familiar with amateur radio line of sight is something like we would use for handy talkies this is a vhf uhf handheld radio that we can talk into people hear us on the other side if they're on the same frequency we're on rf generally will transmit further than your eyeballs can see the actual visible light but just keep that in mind we're basically talking about ranges that your rf can pass because and we'll make this quick the frequency is high enough that it just keeps going across the face of the earth out in the atmosphere and away so line of sight implies just that it just kind of goes away from the direction the radiation of your antenna and just keeps going but that doesn't really help you i think you want to know like concrete numbers well the current world record for a lower device is 150 kilometers and it's held by a youtuber a very good youtuber that you should go subscribe to andreas spees further you should go subscribe to andreas because he covers many different things you can do with laura going beyond where we've started which is just using the meshtastic firmware and meshtastic software but i'm going to do a simple little range test in and around my suburb area there's going to be houses that are going to get in the way and interfere with the signal and we're going to see how far in a realistic setting i can drive around and still reach my home node all right i've got a couple more t beams to add to my arsenal these are ready to go they have their batteries already installed and they're operating but i want to make this one more of an outdoor node so what i went and did is i got my little plano box and i'll just show you when i did i popped an sma female connector here and inside my little box there is a run of coax to an sma mail connection so now i have a kind of semi-waterproof box and if i wanted to improve that i could add some hot glue or you know some other waterproofing like liquid tape liquid electrical tape so let's just go ahead and install this simply just and screw in the antenna connection for the coax i am going to power this on but as was recommended only power on with an antenna connected never never power on without an antenna so this coax you know is going to help a bit but we don't want to damage this board in any way so i'm going to go ahead and screw the stock antenna onto the back here okay good oh guys we're gonna do the range test but i don't want to go in the roof and mount this permanently because i haven't uh figured out a solution for solar yet um i'm gonna punch a hole and put a grommet in but regardless let's uh just use my dx commander pole here so grab not the end obviously that's not going to be strong enough i'm going to go to like this third let's go with the fourth one and i'm just going to tape it on i'm not going to do anything complicated here so piece of tape this is not a permanent solution obviously so don't come at me now let's do a piece of tape right on top here of the slide over there you go all right i don't mind if this turns i just want this antenna to be up uh that's it so all right let's go set this up outside [Music] make sure you tighten this up as you go [Music] all right going up the pole here and there he is there's a little node i was really not plus by that so i went and just uh put it in the front yard and we're gonna try this one more time and see what kind of range we can get all right with some uh fiddle farting around it turned out that my one of my t-beams was outdated so if i do driveway now looking for that little check mark on the cloud and there we go we got a check mark okay that means we can continue our testing all right first stop about one quarter mile from my house let's park right here t-beam on the roof all right one-quarter mile we got it quarter mile done next let's go to a park down the street here which is about one half mile as the crow flies all right we're about one half mile now i'll go ahead and throw this at my roof this is the park that my kids like to play at so we'll go one half mile all right we're three quarters to a mile from my house t-beam on the roof and it worked oh i almost did it almost away and it worked let's uh let's push it up a little bit and see what we can do is going to be the walmart parking lot we're in a little bit closer to my house but there's some bigger buildings here so i want to see if that affects it at all we did come up over an over ramp and there is like a change in elevation a bit so i'm thinking that's what's blocking me so a lot of this has to do with elevation but sitting on my car we did we made it home from the walmart which is pretty good all right we are two miles away uh it's kind of a clear shot over that way i'm trying to get the buildings you know i know where the big buildings are so i'm trying to avoid them a bit so i'm trying to help this out a little i don't think it's gonna make it but we'll try what the heck all right it's out we've got our t-beam connected it did it two miles it made it [Laughter] that's crazy wow all right we're three miles out let's see how she goes three miles seems like it's not possible to be honest taking a little while take a little while it's not looking good and at the three minute mark you probably can't see that but we got the um the cross to the cloud which means it didn't make it i'm guessing that's uh line of sight particularly as we add more buildings and more suburban sprawl between us and my home location and my relay that's probably what's causing it so a couple things comes to mind after doing this test obviously when you're in an area with you know concrete buildings overpasses for freeways and whatnot it's very likely that your signal is going to get attenuated by that and decreased i guess so people don't at me absorbed would be the right word the second thing that came up a lot in that video was how to actually put the screen on the t-beam a lot of people were really worried about that they were worried about soldering and what to do so i'm going to show you right now what it is you have to do to do the soldering it's actually very easy you shouldn't be that concerned about it if you have any capability to use a soldering iron or know someone that has one you'll be able to make this happen real easily be more confident i know you can do it all right got our uh board out here this little screen is gonna mount right here and i've already placed what these called pin headers this little riser and it goes on the 3v3 gnc etc so to do this i'm going to tilt my my project here a little bit with my clamp that's just how i like to do it you can do it your own way um if you have a helper that may make things a little bit easier for you i have my soldering iron set to 650 degrees at the current moment i'm gonna add a bit of solder okay i'm gonna grab my little wire brush here that i clean the tip with and we're going to tin a little bit more on this is called tinning sometimes you have to come in at kind of an angle so i'm using i'm using two fingers to hold the solder i'm going to use my thumb to push and then i'm going to come over the top with the heat so just something like this and that's kind of like a call it a spot weld so i've i've spot welded that into place so now i can go through and solder the rest of the spots on so now you can see i've got the underside of the board right here and we're just gonna go in and add a little bit more solder cover each one of the uh the pins with solder clean your iron as you go okay and then we'll bring the board back up to regular view so now we have this pin header in place you see it right here okay now we take our screen our screen's already lined up it already has the holes pre whole pre-cut and there's already all the paths in line so we just need to go in and solder it in place so we're going to go back over touch the iron touch some solder and then i'll go in and hold the screen a little bit and then it'll freeze as it cools and then we can do the rest that's all there is to it just like that done okay and to tie things out a bit i'm going to try and answer a lot of your questions that were left on the video i know range and concerns about the little t-beam device were kind of a concern so hopefully with that waterproof box and showing you the screen that makes all sense but let's talk some comments here's a good one cody slab says dude what's the discord uh i i posted in that video that there is a website the meshtastic website it is linked in the description of that video and this video where you can go to get to their discord and find numerous other things there was many questions regarding where do i go to find more information that kind of stuff so again it's in the description and if you go to that website you'll be able to find what you're looking for if you poke around a bit drake dorsch asks what is the best frequency reigns i can choose 433 megahertz 486 megahertz 915 megahertz and 923 megahertz which is the best i know 433 is an open band but not very long range what works for the longest distance so there's something to keep in mind here if you want to do this license free you need to use the 9 15 megahertz devices if you are in north america i'll post a link in the description to a blog or it's a post to note though this is a channelized system there are 64 channels 125 kilohertz channels each and they go from 902.3 megahertz to 914.9 914.9 megahertz those channels are going to be hopped between because this is a spread spectrum technology to communicate with these laura devices so keep that in mind if you're in north america most people that watch me are in north america 9 15 megahertz is where you want to be so this is more of a comment but it's it's worthy of mentioning so everybody can understand this is from uncle stewie and he says laura makes a good remote serial port as well tack one onto your repeater controller beautiful because that's basically what you can do with these devices the idea behind a lot of this stuff is the internet of things technology where you slap a lora device onto something that has a serial port control and then you use other lower devices to communicate to it at distance again line of sight all right dr mosfet says i've been looking for a no license walkie talkie with secure communications capability this is as close as i've seen so far hope you're going to do some range tests yeah in future videos are you able to disable transmission of your gps location if needed you and then somebody replied it was jay garrett said you probably can disable the gps but i don't know if it's legal to have it encrypted it's weird so ham you cannot encrypt or secure and you have to broadcast where you live in your phone number but wi-fi you can only have mild encryption i'm not sure where this falls exactly that's assuming you were trying to follow the laws if not disregard and carry on good sir okay couple of good points to note there yes this is encrypted um every one of these little channels that you make is an encrypted communication line is it good encryption strong encryption that somebody wanted to figure out what you're up to no probably not second the 915 megahertz space and again we talked about a range that it exists in but that's what we call it that ban 915 megahertz space that is license free you don't have to have a license to use these devices in it so i know you're watching me the ham radio crash course but you don't need a license to be able to play with these that's why it's so fun and interesting to use particularly with people that you just may interact with neighbors whatever friends etc chuck cribbs right you never mentioned the iphone app you were using i could not find flight test in the app store okay so this is this is a bit of a walking point right this is kind of new software so you have to keep this in mind all right so we have to walk around this a little bit test flight is an application that iphone users and ipads etc can download anything ios it is a beta software it creates like a beta test environment it's an application that allows other applications to run mesh tastic is in beta right now on test flight so you need to go to the meshtastic website go and take the link and i'll post the i'll try and post the link in the description so you can find it or you have to go to the discord and get the link for the beta version of meshtastic for ios that will prompt you most likely to download test flight and test flight again is its own little app you have to have both though and you must have test flight before you can download the meshtastic app okay now for the android users because this also came up again the the app got taken off of the google play store you can still download it via the amazon play store whatever they call it so you have to load the amazon store on your android search for mesh tastic then you can use it and download it it's the same app i believe they're trying to get the meshtastic app back up on the google play store but they're working on it if you want to ask questions about that again go join their discord that is where the most conversation seems to be happening and i'll post the link in the description so you can go direct washi number one i think made some assumptions here that i i think would be important to uh to correct do i miss something is a off-grid not without power all over the planet how can then someone use their home wifi without internet also bad people could find someone easier yes okay so all those are good points but the thing to remember is when i say off grid it implies that these systems work off of battery power or their own sustainable power source in this case just batteries and you can plug a solar panel into the lower devices and they work your iphones or tablets or whatever they run on batteries too so if you have solar panels you can be off grid entirely with these devices now i know some people get salty in the youtube comments and i'm trying to take this uh for the purpose of exchanging information for people that actually have a similar concern bob just bob writes off grid dot dot dot texting dot why pretend so i misunderstood i don't understand the comment i said pretend what what did i say that isn't true and they replied texting is the essence of being on grid that hopefully i answered with the last uh question no these are creating their own network they're creating their own service if you will these devices mesh together and can send messages between any laura node that is brokering that communication this isn't using the internet this isn't using a t verizon whomever service provider you have they are not involved this is using bluetooth from your phone and an app to talk to the lora device and then the lower device is doing the heavy lifting of moving that data to other nodes to get it to the appropriate destination i want to thank everybody for the tremendous amount of great comments that you all provided and again this video may not have answered your specific questions at some point the level of detail of your question might well go beyond my understanding at this point so again go to the discord for meshtastic or start looking at the different laura forums and different spaces that exist learn more about laura wan etc i hope this was helpful i hope this is something that maybe answered some questions if you were on the fence about getting more engaged in this and you actually have a need that this might fulfill i hope it all helped anyway thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this give me a thumbs up i'd really appreciate it and if you have not already please subscribe i'm josh ki6naz hammering a crash course and i'll talk to you later see ya [Music]

Channel: Ham Radio Crash Course

Views: 34,137

Keywords: ham radio, Ham radio crash course, how to get your technician license, what to do with ham radio, having fun with ham radio, how to run a ham radio net, hoshnasi, introduction to ham radio, ham radio basics, amateur radio, amateur radio antenna, ham radio antenna, operating HF, qrp antenna, hf radio antenna, calling cq on hf, ham radio review, amateur radio review, Meshtastic, LoRa wan

Id: OwTy_-Y-A5o

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DarkStarPDX]

My T-Beam radios are on the way!