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Finished a 6 hour road trip from a wedding back to home. hit a new record of total nodes seen!
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Running a Lilygo T3S3 with an 8dbi antenna, just let it sit on the dashboard of my truck the whole drive back.
Meshtastic usage is definitely growing. I hope to get more people into it in my local area, and my gf and I are going to develop some mobile hardware for when we are offroading.
8dbi is really too high for this as that starts to become incredibly directional and flat. If you drove through the mountains at any point during that trip, there's a good chance you missed some nodes due to the elevation changes and that antenna picking up from too flat of an elevation area. It's generally better to use a lower gain antenna such as 3dbi instead.
I can guarantee you with the mountains I was driving through, no amount of verticality would have gotten me more nodes. Driving through the PNW it goes from valley floor to precipitous alpine crevasses very quickly and they are not heavily populated.
I need the 8dbi for home as my rural town is not node dense (yet) and I can't reliably reach the few other area nodes with the t3s3's included 2dbi antenna.
Edit: should also add the "8db" is some random aliexpress antenna so claims are not to be believed. Based on size it's probably more like a 5dbi at best.