So, I’m scratching my head, and hoping someone here can help, or have had a similar experience?
I live at 500msl in a small rural town of about 300 people. Started experimenting about a month ago and have a few T1000-E’s and a station g2. The waterproof enclosure I ordered for the g2 finally arrived a few days ago and it’s now up on a modest pole attached to my house (about 4m high), signal is much better and we only have 3 regular members of our mesh at this stage (still testing before advertising to locals).
Even before raising the g2, we’d had a few times when a couple of nodes would appear for a few hours in the early hours of the morning. We are in an area popular with hiking and 4wders so this isn’t particularly unlikely especially as these are given as ideal use cases for Meshtastic, and sometimes people do get up early for this kind of thing!
But last night, we had an absolute explosion of nodes in the early hours. All had gps locations of around a very specific area on the coast, approximately 180km away as the crow flies. I think one or two of them had been seen before but I’d wiped my nodeDB a few times since then so not completely sure.
The similarity to previous times when we saw a few nodes in early hours, but many more (with g2 higher, makes sense regardless of how), makes me wonder now if something atmospheric is happening.
Could this be tropospheric ducting? If so has anyone managed to actually communicate with this kind of connection over MT?
Yes, it’s a heat inversion, similar to how a highway will shimmer during the summer heat. Because the air is warmer at higher altitude than it is at lower altitude.
The technical name for it is a tropospheric duct, as you mentioned above. And no, I have not been able to communicate with nodes reliably over it. I think I did manage it once, but I never got a response back, so I’m not certain if it went through or not.
Thanks! That’s super exciting. Will try and send out some DMs next time it happens - just to get the more reliable ack. I doubt many people are awake at the times it is probably strongest signal though.
I agree with the plane theory, one time my nodes were hopping to a plane and reaching nodes in Canada with the farthest node reached being 115mi/185km
As far as I know the frequencies Meshtastic plays with doesn’t really do anything crazy when it comes to propogation. That’s why good line of sight is so vital
So what you’re saying is, we all need to bring our nodes in the air? lol
No idea. Might also have been someone in a plane right above. We have had nodes appear that were all across the state, then disappear after about 30 mins because someone in a plane had a mesh device.
Fairly unlikely it was a plane due to the time frame in which the nodes were refreshing - was over at least 4 hours from when the first distant node was seen, to no longer seen / refreshing. And all the nodes were apparently from this one distant area, which is about 4-5 hours drive away, because it’s on the other side of a big bay. And didn’t see any other familiar nodes that were closer, of which there are quite a few.
Try meshmap and have it running for a while. If it’s consistent, you will get more info either way.