Its a LILYGO T3S3 (a module focused on handheld use) stuck into a housing I modeled myself and 3d printed out of ASA plastic. It has some Chinese “high gain” 915MHz antenna inside the grain silo looking part, which is oversize to prevent too much signal reflection/distortion from the plastic being too close to the antenna. Its powered by 18ga alarm system wire that I draped down the roof to a 5v power supply on the deck. And since I’m renting, non permanent modifications only, thus the clamp to the vent pipe.
Its what I had, just to get started. Quickly realized I needed to be on my roof to get any good connections in my node-sparse area haha.
So far it’s working well, I have 13 consistent mesh connections with 3 direct connections, when before I would previously only get spotty connections to the mesh at all from inside my house.
I’ll buy some better base station hardware later, once I put one up at my girlfriend’s house a few miles away…
I’ve been looking into Reticulum to build a resilient network that includes lora.
Hmm, very interesting. Being able to run true data over LoRa or any other radio/comm method is definitely cool but not really that useful to me I think, it’s a little too flexible. I need more of a set-and-forget service that I realistically only use for text messages. The more complex the setup, the less likely me or any of my friends are to actually adopt it- and I’m not that crazy of a digital prepper lol.