LoRa ⁽²⁾

I made some time to have a play with Meshcore on 868MHz. I had a Meshtastic node in the loft but locally the only traffic was people sending test messages so I fell out of love with it. I installed Meshcore as a USB client which allowed me to talk to it via one of the Linux boxes here and use a command-line interface but it was lacking in features. Anyway, I found another 868MHz device today and installed the Meshcore BLE companion code, and then swaped the loft node for the repeater code. After a little while it all came to life. There is a repeater about 7km from here that my loft repeater can see so my tap into the network is via that. It is much nicer using the iPhone or iPad app than struggling with the serial connection - well, no surprise there of course. As to how useful it will be, to me it still feels a tad toy like but that's probably just me.

My latest reorganisation is to set up a Raspberry Pi to connect various LoRa devices providing power and a console to each. I have four such devices, three of which were powered from a 12V PSU with a USB adapter plugged into the 'cigar lighter' socket, adn one was powered from the ADS-B feed in the loft which in turn is powered by the Pi that does the ADS-B feed. That powers the rtl-sdr dongle plus an LNA, both colocated with the collinear in the loft. The new setup consists of a 7-way USB hub with switchable power to each USB connector. This hub is connected to the USB 3 port on a Pi 4B. Five ports are in use, one for the radiosonde receiver, one for the TinyGS receiver, one for the 868MHz Meshtastic node in the loft, and one for the 70cm Meshcom node also in the loft. The latter two are fed via 15m USB leads. The fifth connection is not an active device - it is my illuminated shack sign! This gives several advantages. First, each device can be power cycled without needing to fiddle with the USB connectors. Second, each can have a console on…