High bandwidth vs High range lora tradeoff for setting up a large swarm of R(T)nodes
Started by welo ·
I'm going to be doing the same thing in southern Ontario. According to the Meshtastic site planner the short-fast settings should get me the whole town but going lower bitrate doesn't help much because of all the hills around us. Does that sound correct or am I misreading it?
aetherlab wrote:
Just keep in mind, that if the window has low-emission glass (metal laced glass), you not only will greatly attenuate the signal outside, but also detune the antenna resonance and make it an improper load for the LoRa radio, which will result in even worse performance. Clear simple glass is RF transparent and will not detune the antenna. I would not put antennas in touch of anything, if possible.
I'm not entirely sure if my window is metal laced but still leaving the antenna outside would probably be ideal (at the very least it would allow for a better field of view and line of sight is king), but the price of having the entire module outside with case and power solution is high enough that I figured I could just buy another Heltic and 3bi antenna for the same price and and the combined reach of both would be better than any outdoor set up I could make. I've still managed to get a connection from 2.4km away from indoors another house so it does still work, granted, this is 2.4km in the direction of the window, I was getting 700-900 meters in any other direction which is pretty bad even through a kind of urban environment but there's not much that can be done there I don't think.
There are these https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007992698656.html which means you have only the antenna outside jammed through the window and can have the rest of the board indoors, and I may do that for my personal set up at some point but since I'm setting a lot of these up in other people's homes, I just decided the risk of the antenna falling or whatever is too high for me to do that everywhere and setting the antenna next to a window has the best ratio of still having decentish range while also being really easy to set up. It's obviously not the best but it does work.
But, I'll try not directly taping the antennas to the windows if the set up allows because that seems like a simple way of avoiding the issue of detuning :P