Welcome fellow gophernauts. Once again it is (or was) September
which means it's ROOPHLOCH [1] month! Also unsurprisingly, it's
down to the wire for my entry this year.
I'm looking forward to reading all the entries this year; there's
always some novel approaches that inspire me to try something new.
For my attempt this year, I wanted to experiment with LoRa and see
if it could work using readily available equipment and software.
So I just took a Heltec v3 and a Lilygo T-Deck, wired up some
batteries, threaded on a couple stubby rubber duck antennas, and
printed some cases for them (this took longer than expected). Then
they were flashed with Meshtastic. I put the Heltec on a shelf
near a window and took the T-Deck for a bike ride to see how it
got along. The post is below:
8< --------------------------SNIP---------------------------------
Posting via meshtastic down the road at the farm. Surprisingly
works just fine here. Pretty neat to be sending this license free
while toodling about on the bike.
Just for grins trying this from the T-Deck by the old bridge.
Wow better signal from here over the hill. Anyways I'm off to
enjoy my ride. It's a little warm but great right now before the
rains.
----------------------------SNIP------------------------------ >8
I'm excited that this worked well using the unlicensed band and
low power running regular meshtastic. Once I returned I just
slurped the messages off the home device and pushed them here.
Hopefully I can come up with an automated way to post using a
tailposter like the APRS attempt to make this a bit more
streamlined. I'll have to push the limits of the distance too and
see how far I can communicate before it starts getting spotty, but
a couple miles wasn't a chore at all.
I also picked up a pager with regional service in an attempt to
wean me off the smartphone, and to provide a single contact
point now that there's a staffing change underway. It's an old
refurbished Motorola, and it's not 100% but I'll use it and see
how it goes long term. I've already got some ideas on automating
some alerts to send and some basic information while out and
about.
Anyways, I better get this posted before October rolls in. And
once again, happy ROOPHLOCH!
Tags: #roophloch #meshtastic #lora #cycling #pager #motorola #advisor
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TEXT [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2024.txt