Thanks, Josh and Mike. I was hoping you'd chime in. The best practices
for repeater config is especially appreciated. I was describing a scheme
with two repeaters here, the one relying on the other to escape the
neighborhood. And thanks, Mike for the pointers to support tools.
Pete
On 8/25/26 16:26, Josh Wyatt wrote:
Greetings Pete,
Looks like you've made great progress! Some notes/things that jumped
out while reading your thorough and informative email:
1. Transmit power from the repeater is important for your repeater to
be able to reach other repeaters and others' companion nodes, not just
your own companions; unless you're in an area flush with other
repeaters, and/or want your repeater to be "household only" (AKA not
interacting or contributing to the existing mesh beyond your
location), you'll want to run power at the maximum possible.
2. The byte hash size should be set to 2 or 3. I think what happens
is, a hash is calculated using N bytes from the key, which is then
used as a unique identifier for the repeater/node. A single byte hash
results in collisions when trying to uniquely identify contacts/nodes.
The caveat is that older firmwares can only do single byte hashes, so
it's somewhat of a backward compatibility thing. I don't think any
nodes in the rdumesh are running such old firmware.
3. I can't offer advice on the telemetry bits; I've also tried making
it publicly available without much success.
4. Two excellent resources, if you're not already aware, are the
rdumesh.org <http://rdumesh.org> website, and a couple of discord
servers, "RDUMesh" at https://discord.gg/GBUyuk2H6, and "NC Mesh" at
https://discord.gg/jsxevk7zp . There are other discords for meshcore,
LoRa, etc, but these are regionally apropos for us and pretty active.
5. Do note that another set of recommended repeater configurations for
our area are region settings. They're meant to curb wayward traffic
over time. Details here:
https://rdumesh.org/meshcore-region-scoping-setup-guide/
Happy Meshing!
Josh
On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 2:55 PM Pete Soper via TriEmbed
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Glen,
I got as much config as I could up front and suffered with
making changes after hoisting the node. It blows my mind that
there is no "help" command in CLI mode. That's so 1960s astronaut
in a world with megabytes of available flash.
I set an admin password and put a copy of the keys in a safe place.
Putting latitude and longitude in place and making this
available is important too unless you aren't comfortable with
folks knowing where you are. I didn't bother to hook up a GPS but
configuring this up front is also on the check list.
I swear I configured my repeater to allow folks to see my
telemetry (DC supply voltage and ESP32 chip temp), but it appears
to require admin login to access, even with a "blank" password. I
obviously didn't understand what I was doing and am left wondering
how to fix this with some other definition of "blank". I think I
missed this step doing the initial configuration and "fixed it"
with a CLI session. But you can't put the set command in with no
characters after the resource name: it flags this as an unknown
command (IMO it's silly to call this "unknown"). I eventually
found the settings interface and was able to change the password
without typing anything into the text box but that didn't change
anything.
I set minutes between to "adverts" to 240 minutes (longest
interval allowed) and "flood advert" every 25 hours so the advert
time of day would wander around the clock over time.
I set the radio to 50% transmit duty cycle: the default. This is
a regulatory issue, by the way and 50% is max in the US. The
allowed duty cycle is much less than 50 in Europe, for instance
(10% I think). This is to cap potential interference and give
other stations a fair chance to use the band.
I set power to 22dbm. With the Heltec 32 V4 there is a 17db
attenuater between the radio and power amp but I was too lazy to
look at specs and see the most efficient way to get full power
output. That's on my list. A repeater that is inside your house
should not need anywhere near the max. My "companion-driven mode"
is set to 10dbm but I suspect it could hit the repeater with less
than that. Note that vertical antennas with gain have attenuated
signal/receive capability "underneath". Picture a cone with a
varying angle to the "skirt". So my repeater's skirt encompasses
some major fraction of the house. It would have been better to
have it further away because of this.
I temporarily set coding rate to 8. The default 5 gives "5-4 =
1" correction bit per 4 payload bits, 6 gives 2, 7 gives 3, 8
(max) gives 4s correction bits per 4 payload bits. My bias with
this stuff is to give myself maximum chance of success until the
node is actually handling traffic properly and needs optimization.
But this extends "on the air time" significantly and ties up other
node's receivers, so that's not very neighborly while you're
gathering data for optimization. One of a gaggle of changes I'd
like to make to the firmware is per destination optimization of
the coding rate, TX power level, etc. If anybody is doing their
own firmware builds I'd love to hear about any relevant build
tips. IMO there shouldn't even be fixed parameters but instead for
stations fixed in place the system should adjust to every node it
has "conversations" with over time. Notice that our WiFi networks
don't blast at full power all the time.
I selected one byte hash mode without having a clue what this
means for the chances of joy or sorrow. The choices are one, two
or three bytes and this also affects "time on the air".
On 8/25/26 13:25, Glen Smith via TriEmbed wrote:
Pete,
Any thing specific that needs to be done with configuration re
repeater vs a companion node? I think I'm going to do the same -
deploy a repeater and see how things go. According to the map I
have other repeaters closer to me than you do. Some careful
branch selection may allow me to put the trunk shadow Mike
mentions in an optimal position.
On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 9:55 AM Pete Soper via TriEmbed
<[email protected]> wrote:
I put a Heltec 32 V4 configured as a repeater near the top of
a tree
roughly 60-70ft above ground yesterday and initially the
results were
very discouraging: I could no longer hit the Carolina
Backhaul in Chapel
Hill I'd been clinging to earlier; by setting coding rate to
8 aka "max
error correction bits" I could ping it and get an ack one
time out of
three. But I left everything running over night and this
morning the
contacts in the companion driven node connected to my
repeater had maxed
out. One of them jumped right off the screen of my phone: DH
Hill
library at NC State 14 miles away. I tried pinging it and
had immediate
and repeatable success! So I have at least one reliable path
out of my
"tree farm near Apex" with this setup and hopefully there
will be others
in the companion node's contact list and data structures
inside the
repeater. I'm fully expecting this link to break down on
rainy days
until I can get a node above most of my trees. Still, this
success will
keep me going. And this setup is a hack, running with a 10AH
battery.
I'll keep it up as much as I can after protecting the guts
from rain and
as time allows swap in solar power and hopefully get it near
the top of
a very tall Tulip Poplar here. The immediate priorities are
to turn
attention back to gathering info and publishing it on the
TriEmbed web
site and proposing some fun-oriented tutorial meetings.
Pete
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