915 MHz – LoRa Meshtastic Patrons Wanted!
We are building an experimental LoRa Meshtastic network in Anchorage! If you have one of these LoRa nodes and are willing to help us with this project, join the network with the following settings and channel information:
LoRa Configuration
Region: United States
Presets: Long range-Fast
LoRa Channel Number: 20
Channel Information
Name: KL7AA
Passcode: leave this empty
This will allow you to get on the KL7AA chat channel. If you set this channel as your “primary” channel, then you can also send location and telemetry information. If you set this channel as your “secondary” channel, no GPS information will be exchanged. Basically, this allows you to choose if you want other users to be able to see your location. Alternatively, you could simply turn the GPS off if you set this as your primary channel (again, obviously, no location info would be transmitted). That said, given that we are developing this network, it would be cool to see what kind of coverages we are getting, hence having your location info would be helpful.
There are different flavors of LoRa, including LoRaWAN and Meshtastic. Our system is using the Meshtastic protocol. We have one node located at 1,450 feet in elevation on the South Anchorage Hillside which appears to provide excellent coverage across most of Anchorage. There are a few other nodes expected to be online soon.
To learn more about Meshtastic and LoRa, visit the Meshtastic website.
Dennis Jones, AL5K is spearheading this project. You can reach out to him at:
AL5K.rado@gmail.com
FYI – Dennis’s nodes are called “Apex” and “Rover”. You might see them on the network. Feel free to Direct Message (DM) Dennis through those nodes or on the “KL7AA” channel itself.
One note of caution: Do NOT run a “Range Test” on the KL7AA channel. If the KL7AA channel is set as your Primary Channel, the Range Test will “SPAM” the channel. This would be bad form 😉
A bit more info…..
There is quite a bit of crossover between “Licensed” and “Unlicensed” service with this system. Unless you have some reason to configure your node as a “Licensed Operator” (for instance, running an amplifier), then there is basically no reason to configure your node as “Licensed Operator”. You can find more information on the Meshtastic website about this setting.
See you on 33 cm band!
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