6/4/2025 UPDATE! We went out to do further tests with a different antenna setup. The goal was to beat 4 miles. The base station was exactly the same. The mobile station sprouted an 8.5dbi vertical on a magmount. We had some learning experiences.
1) It had rained earlier. That rain cost us almost half a mile of range loss. We were testing out towards an agg area with some tall trees. The wet trees did adversely affect range. This was confirmed using the same exact setup we had achieved 3 miles with before. We might have hit our 4 mile goal today if it wasn’t for the wet foliage.
2) Secondly, the high gain vertical on the magmount gained us about half a mile over the high gain ducky. It should have done better. I blame coax loss. Next time I’ll bring an RF adapter and we’ll attach the mesh board directly to bottom of antenna.
3) Shut off your MQTT and put your hops on zero before running range test. We confirmed we did not get any undocumented digipeats on our prior test but these changes will keep any digipeats from skewing your data.
I’m still wanting to try the node on a 10′ painters pole test. Shooting for those 5 miles!
Previous post – Yes… 100 MILLIWATTS!
W1CLT and I did some non scientific range tests with our meshtastic units. The results were quite surprising.
His station was a Lilygo T-Beam in a 3D printed case with a folding antenna similar to whats found on wifi routers. It sat in a holder on the dashboard of his SUV and ran off the built in battery.
My station was my current mesh base setup. It’s a Heltec V3 board, 5db fiberglass antenna, short length of teflon coax, and a Chinese regulator board to drop 12v to 4vdc to feed the board. Power is furnished by a solar panel and regulator to a 7ah lithium iron battery. The Heltec, antenna, and 12v to 4v regulator are at the top of a 22′ mast in a weatherproof enclosure with a solar shield. A length of 2 conductor cable runs 12v power up the mast.
We set the two stations in range test mode so they pinged each other every 15 seconds and he went out for a ride while I reported back via cell what I was receiving. First he went north and we topped off at just under 2 miles. This was in an average single family home residential area.
The surprise came when he went straight due west from my QTH out passed Krome Ave. We couldn’t believe he was still getting pings at 2.5 miles! He kept riding west and we maxed out at 3 miles. I picked him up at a max of 2.9 miles, he kept getting my pings at 3 miles. This was with his unit on the dash of his SUV, on side of road, front of car pointed back towards my house. We tried to go further but that was it. Still, pretty damn amazing for 100mw, 900mhz cheap little data radios with no semblance of a properly filtered receiver!
Granted, this was out in farm and single family home land. No tall buildings. Had he put his portable unit on a painters pole 10′ up, we’d definitely have reliable text messaging capability.
Moral of the story? Meshtastic can be a viable mode of emergency coms if you just take the time to get your unit up over the rooftops. Our next trick? Go further of course! We’ll see how far we can go from my base putting the field unit with it’s ducky antenna on something easily attainable like a 10′ PVC pipe or painters pole.
