Has anyone tried a similar abomination? The main node I use has a 2dBi antenna. A 5dBi antenna performs worse for connecting to most of the nodes in my vicinity. It does however connect to some nodes further away. So I decided to try adding a separate 5dBi node. That way devices close by could choose to route via either node, whichever seems better. Or traffic could jump between the two taking local traffic from the 2dBi node and beaming it further via the 5dBi node at the expense of an extra hop. Thoughts, experiences?
I think this sounds like a really good idea, the only thing I could think of to change might be to separate the two nodes a bit more. I don't know if this is as much of a problem on 915mhz since the wavelength is so short but generally you would want to keep two antennas farther apart to prevent interference, from having metal near by or from potential cross-talk
I'm thinking about mounting two radios in a single box with one antenna sticking out of the top and one from the bottom. Like a light sabre.
Rule of thumb is to keep the antennas at least one wavelength apart. On the 915 MHz band, that's 33 centimeters. So that should be the distance between the two antennas at minimum.
Would that matter if only one is transmitting at a time?
possibly as it could still couple to the other antenna and throw off the standing wave ratio
Yeah, I think that would definitely do the trick! I'm thinking about doing a similar setup to make a big meshtastic repeater node for my house that I can use with smaller handheld nodes so that I can get connected to the farther away networks in the city
CLIENT_BASE, not repeater or router
I concur, do not use REPEATER/ROUTER roles unless you know what you're doing (have a very high mast, hill, high building roof, etc. read the doc) as it's very likely you'd be harming the network instead of helping. Using a device configured as CLIENT/CLIENT_BASE extends the network without risking harm.