I thought that was the Mid-Atlantic Accent?

HeltecV3 is probably the lowest-cost point of entry. It doesn’t have GPS or battery (though it has a battery connector and charger built in if you want to add a battery later). Some come with a case, some don’t, but there are lots of cases for them if you have a 3D printer.

The LoRa antenna isn’t integrated though (uses a U.FL connector) but it comes with a little mini-whip. I’m not sure I can recall any Meshtastic-compatible boards that have a fully-integrated antenna.

Running it directly from a solar panel is possible, but the ESP32-based boards aren’t the most power-efficient. I have one of mine running from solar but it’s got a 2000 mAh battery to smooth it out.

The nRF-based boards are more power efficient but they’re a little more expensive and may lack Wifi.

Edit/Addition: Also, be careful powering at least the Heltecs from solar – make sure you use a solar panel with a voltage regulator. I used a small, unregulated 1W panel on two of them and it burnt out the USB->UART controller on them (they didn’t like its 6V). They both still work but can’t use the USB port for serial connection anymore (have to use an external serial adapter to the pin headers). One of those is now a base station connected over Wifi, and the other is acting as a repeater.

i should clarify a generic radio repeater that inst meshtastic but is able to repeat LORA signal

Well, the numbers I gave would be the same since those Meshtastic “modes” are just profiles for different LoRa settings, and the same LoRa Settings + frequency slot still applies (Meshtastic just runs on top of that).

I think what you’re looking for is a dumb signal repeater, but I’m not super knowledgeable of the pros/cons/legality of those for the entire 915 MHz band. You’d be repeating anything in that frequency range, not just LoRa. And those also repeat noise the same as signal. Basically, it could end up making things worse in the long run by introducing noise.

Probably best to just coordinate with or start a community mesh group and settle on a specific frequency and LoRa settings.

AFAIK, the only way to truly turn them off is to remove the battery or cut the positive lead and splice in a switch. Only drawback is the switch has to be on for it to be able to charge, so that’s a bit awkward. The “soft off” when you hold the power button is just deep sleep.

Mine frequently wake up from deep sleep but not after 5 minutes. More like 3-4 days. Which makes keeping a few always charged difficult.

Edit: I just checked the Power settings in the app (they’ve changed it a bit since I set mine up). The longest it can deep sleep is 72 hours it seems. Maybe yours is set to 5 minutes?

I don’t think what you’re trying to do is very practical.

For US 915, there are between 52 (SHORT_TURBO) and 208 (LONG_SLOW) frequency slots. Each node has to use the same LoRA parameters (called mode presets in Meshtastic) as well as the same frequency slot in order to communicate (or relay).

LoRa signals are low bandwidth (125, 250, or 500 kHz) so there are a lot of frequency slots. In addition to having one radio for each frequency slot, you would also have to have one for each LoRA parameter preset in that frequency slot. Nodes can only operate in one mode and frequency at a time.

So to cover all cases, you’d need:

• 52 nodes operating in SHORT_TURBO mode
• 104 nodes operating in SHORT_FAST
• 104 nodes operating in SHORT_SLOW
• 104 nodes in MEDIUM_FAST
• 104 in MEDIUM_SLOW
• 104 in LONG_FAST mode
• 208 in LONG_MODERATE mode
• Plus another 208 in LONG_SLOW mode

Source for those counts

That’s a total of 988 nodes to cover all, and that’s not even getting into the fact that they’d be talking over each other.

Basically, if you want to be a generic repeater (note the docs clearly state to not run repeater mode willy-nilly), it’s best to stick with LONG_FAST, set your custom channels as primary (if you even want to have custom channels, that is), and create a LongFast secondary channel with the default dummy encryption key. Then manually set your radio frequency to the one used by the default LONG_FAST setting (908.875 MHz).

That’s basically what I do and lets me have my own private channels while also relaying for and being able to make contact with anyone else using the default config.

Edit: Coordination of local frequencies, etc is usually done by forming a Meshtastic community group. Then you could just join (or start) that group and use a standardized frequency and LoRa parameters.

Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).

Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

Basically pretending to be an organic grass-roots movement or to plant the seeds but the movement is to either destabilize or otherwise benefit a foreign entity.

How do you do my fellow Americans? How about we just start burning stuff down?

Basically shit like that (it’s not always that transparent except when it is exactly that transparent). See it pretty often even on here (less so since I’ve enabled “turbo” on my block button).

I guess what I’m saying is we should get the hell rid of it all so eventually public opinion won’t be swayed by cheap foreign labor, bots, and people who just want to burn it all down.

I’ve blocked so many accounts on here that are clearly not Americans just straight up trying to incite shit in US news / politics communities. I don’t know what’s worse: the number of upvotes those get or how transparent they are.

Not sure if ADHD specific or a symptom of being “on the spectrum” or a bit of both (have never been diagnosed either way but show all the signs), but I have a very low capacity “social battery” and am very sensitive to noise. The end result is I crave (relative) solitude and quiet or else I’m useless at getting anything done.

An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal. All ports share OSI layers 1 and 2. Anything you plug into port 24 can always reach anything you have plugged into port 3.

Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2). This lets you create up to 4096 different networks on the same switch; each network is isolated from the other. If port 24 and port 3 are on different VLANs, then they will not be able to communicate unless they can reach a common router at layer 3.

Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).

The available features on a managed/smart switch vary by manufacturer and, often, by the license level (sadly common in enterprise gear). VLANs, port control, mirroring, and LAGs are usually common “baseline” features, though.

Or, you know, we could just quit it with this generational shaming nonsense. It’s not like human beings are complex creatures or anything.

Which begs the question why not magnets at the top of the building to help pull the electricity up?

Guess it depends on the height, but yeah. Otherwise, we manage to pump a town’s worth of water to the top of a tower well enough. From there, gravity can do the rest.

But there’s probably a point where cost for that vs height becomes prohibitive.

If the costs of engineering a tower is more than just buying more land, then why build taller?

Figured it’d be something like that. Explains why they get built out in the middle of nowhere since land is cheap.

Tall data centers do exist in cities where land is expensive.

Probably a bit of “hiding in plain sight” that way, too. There are a few big datacenters relatively near me, and they’re massive compounds in the middle of even more massive corn fields. Kind of stick out like a sore thumb when you’re driving by.

I have yet to play Skyrim with any mods even though I’d really like to. Only thing I have are the DLCs.

Getting it to run under Wine has been challenging enough (though it’s a lot easier these days) so I didn’t want to even attempt to mix mods into it.

I always start out with a random race, head in the opposite direction of Riverwood, eat everything I can pick up, and just start making and selling potions lol. Then I use the money to buy iron ore and start crafting daggers and selling those. Along the way, I may take a few side quests for extra cash. Then eventually buy or build a house.

By the time I finally go to Riverwood to start the main game, I’m…a fully Daedric-clad stealth archer. Every time. lol. (I don’t quite have the patience to level smithing to 100 for dragonbone, so I upgrade that along the way of the main quest).

^^ Every time I play Skyrim