Its a LILYGO T3S3 (a module focused on handheld use) stuck into a housing I modeled myself and 3d printed out of ASA plastic. It has some Chinese "high gain" 915MHz antenna inside the grain silo looking part, which is oversize to prevent too much signal reflection/distortion from the plastic being too close to the antenna. Its powered by 18ga alarm system wire that I draped down the roof to a 5v power supply on the deck. And since I'm renting, non permanent modifications only, thus the clamp to the vent pipe.
Its what I had, just to get started. Quickly realized I needed to be on my roof to get any good connections in my node-sparse area haha.
So far it's working well, I have 13 consistent mesh connections with 3 direct connections, when before I would previously only get spotty connections to the mesh at all from inside my house.
I'll buy some better base station hardware later, once I put one up at my girlfriend's house a few miles away....
That's fun the part - it's used by nerds testing the network, sending "ping". And others replying and setting up BBS systems.
Like…the old school BBS stuff? I thought there was texting and maybe email? Not sure as I am learning too. I’ve used BBSes in the past.
Its like a worse pager system. But it does not use the internet or anything centralized. It makes it look like texting on apps.
Yes, I'm digging the disconnected part, so I am interested. I am looking deeper at self-hosted processes and if they can be provided in a way other than the internet, all the better. Any recommendations on hardware? Looking for base station and portable when I am comfortable knowledge-wise. Any site better than another to source it? Can't/won't do amazon.
I usually direct people over to
helteks because they are cheap and you can get 2 of them in the same box. For more info you can check out the official meshtastic site.Or check out https://rootaccess.org/wiki/Meshtastic/rev447/#-quickstart
If you go with the defaults at least at first, you can see if its something you want to invest your time into. Worst case, you have a couple of these things you can give out to a couple of ham friends. You can go pretty deep with the hobby, but its fun (in my opinion).
Meshtastic is basically just texting, but there are nodes people setup for BBS purposes.