The plan was to finally update my repeater and repeater antenna. This went well. But did it really make a difference? I don't really know. I will have to measure some day.
Some photos from the repeater hardware setup here. See the difference between antennas. The old black antenna is visible left of the new one.
12V is coming out of the solarpanel and 5Ah battery setup originally ment for outdoor cameras. I convert the 12V to 5V with a very cheap car battery charger. A powerbank will not work here because the Seeed studio Xiao nRF52 lora device is using very little power and it would switch off.
The situation at this moment is:
At home: Repeater: PE4BAS Roodeschool - Roomserver: PE4BAS BBS/Room (Antenna height 10m)
At the job: Repeater HB Uithuizen - Roomserver: HB BBS/Room (Antenna height 5m)
The distance between the two repeaters is 6 km.
According to the Meshcore app I have a huge range. But in reality I'm not so sure about that. I think the app does not take buildings around the antenna in account. I've also updated the repeater on my job and since I suddenly could not access the roomserver there. I updated that as well. Then I came home today and my roomserver at home was not working as well, so I updated it to the newest firmware.
So far I am not able to directly connect to the roomserver at my job and from my job I am unable to connect the roomserver at home. I hoped the new antenna would be adding extra dB to reach it but it doesn't. The plan is to replace the antenna at the repeater at my job. I might have to look for a better place for the repeater there. My opinion is that this link between my home and job repeater should be reliable. At this moment it is only possible to connect under special circumstances. This happened only 2 times.
Roomserver bug?
I don't use the Meshcore system all days since the whole thing is not really reliable. Once and a while I update all my devices to see if there is any progress. But features stay almost the same and I don't see any use in the new features build in. For a long time I have an issue with the roomservers. The problem is that messages left on the server from my phone with the heltec V3 connected are perfectly readable by the same system. But if I connect to the same roomserver with my standalone TDeck I can't read the those messages. I can only write and read messages that are left from the TDeck. Like the roomserver has two rooms with a wall in between. This issue appears on both roomservers and probably it is a bug. However I cannot find anything about it on the internet yet? Am I the only one with this issue?
I think the roomserver is the most important station in this mesh network. I wrote about that a while ago. If you're in an emergency your first need is water, shelter and food. When you are busy looking for that you can't be on the phone all the time to read messages. Your phone and companion device might run out of power and you're disconnected from the network. In that case the roomserver on solarpower shines. It stores the messages from others till you're able to retrieve them.
However, I feel the roomserver firmware has issues. And I think the roomserver needs some more development. What and how? I don't know. I am no expert. But at least the "separate rooms" issue should be solved first.
Future plans
Not really. I will leave everything running. I hope to play it once and a while. You never know if you'll need this system. The only thing I will change is to power the roomserver at home with solarpower. Hopefully there will be some more repeaters in the neighbourhood. Experimenting with these LoRa devices is not that expensive and everyone with a little tech interest can do this.
