u/ranfur8

An update on my previous post.

Went on facebook marketplace and got myself a propper antenna, and oh my god does it make a difference, you guys were right about that. Not only can I hear from further away, but I can also reach MUCH further out.

Got a direct link with a node that is 48Km away, which is crazy. Sadly it's just a weather station, so all I get is weather data, but still! That is better than nothing.

Antenna alignment also makes a huge difference, I can't reach my repeater on the roof if my node has it's antenna horizontally aligned, but I can reach it no problems with it vertically aligned.

I heard from a couple of repeaters from around me as well, one at the top of the mountain surounding my city and another one from nearby, but again, unmonitored devices which isn't much fun.

Somebody mentioned that some devices will not "wake up" unless directly messaged. That I don't understand, what's the point of having a device if you're not going to participate in the whole mesh thing?

It's also very true that traceroute is Extremely unreliable. I can't even get a traceroute to my own node sometimes and I'm literally next to it, as in, I can see it. I hope that's something they fix as versions move on, I'll try my best to stay up to date with it.

Also the "last seen" time is extremely unreliable I find, sometimes it shows myself as "last seen 10 minutes ago" but i'm literally connected to the node via bluetooth. What's that about?

As for the rest, I think it's just a waiting game, seeing who comes and goes. I do hope to hear back from more nodes now that I can reach further away.

Also, is there a way to program the LED on the LoRa Board? For example, to blink only when I'm stransmitting or recieving.
I've got an esp32 s3 with a SX1262 lora module, if that helps.

For a bit of context, I've been watching videos about meshtastic for a while now, and finally decided to get into the hobby.

I got myself two XIAO SX1262 ESP32S3 modules and 868-915MHz AYWHP antennas, since that was what everyone was recommending on youtube and such, and it was very cheap so there's that as well.

I've set up one mobile client and another identical base client at the top of my building where I can see pretty much the whole city, and since I live in a bay, I have direct line of sigh with a bunch of cities alongside the coast as well. My trouble is - I can't seem to be able to message basically anyone. I can send messages between my two nodes just fine, but they are barely 50m apart since that's the elevation of the building. But when it comes to messaging other nodes, the messages are "acknowledged" but not "delivered"
There are a couple of nodes in my city that show up on the local meshtastic map, one is just a few streets away, and the other one is up in the mountains. And I, sometimes, can see a lot of nodes around them, but for some weird reson, only during the night. As soon as the sun sets, like 12 new nodes pop up apart from my two and the ones that are nearby.
However I cannot traceroute to them nor I can message them, it just says "Acknowledged"
There's one that I can sometimes get a trace route to, and it says I have a direct connection, which is impossible because that node shows up 50Km away and has the name of another city on the bay.

So in conlusion. As far as I can see, the moment you don't have a direct connection with another node, forget about getting any messages trough, but even then, It's not that useful because when you loose line of sight it stops being "long range" and just becomes "slightly worse than a walkie talkie"

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, perhaps the antenna is not adequate, or the transmitter is just shit since it cost me 10€ each, but either way, It's kind of dissapointing, since the main feature of MESHtastic, donesn't really work.
I wanted to see if I can reliably set up an offgrid messaging platform for friends and family to have a little fun, but it looks like my hobby will be very short lived.

Any advice?