I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

  • 71 Posts
  • 125 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • 🤚totally guilty there.

    I wish there was a way to mute or turn off replies, and I might post more. Sometimes / often I’ll want to post something but definitely do not want to be bombarded with the comments it would generate. Other times, I’ll like the community but not be involved enough in whatever hobby to post anything but still enjoy seeing other people’s work (e.g. HAM radio, sewing, etc).





  • To give perspective with a 3000 mah battery I am still lasting days.

    Is that connected via bluetooth or just running the LoRA radio? Curious if the V4 is any less power hungry than the V3. I never did a rundown test with one of my 3,000 mah V3 units, but my daily driver had a 2000 mah battery and barely made it 14 hours before it was throwing the battery low warning. I kept it connected to my phone the whole time under most conditions.

    Same conditions but with the nRF-based T1000e, it runs for about 2 days on a 700 mAh battery AND has GPS (I didn’t have GPS on my daily driver node). The difference is amazing.


  • Could be any or all of that, yeah. You can also set the level of precision for your reported location, but I don’t think even the lowest precision settings would put it 1,000 miles away.

    I live near-ish to an airport, and I’ll occasionally see nodes that are 1 or 2 hops and 100-200+ miles away. Best I can tell, the airborne node is legit relaying those which I think is pretty cool. Not really useful, but cool.







  • In order and in character:

    1. [Chidi]: No, that would be highly unethical
    2. [Eleanor] Of course. How else would you do it?
    3. [Eleanor] Obviously they had it coming so no harm no foul.
    4. [Jason] Nah, Pill-Boi said it was fine.
    5. [Tahani] My heavens, no. I would never want to upset my friend Ray. Charles. Ray Charles was my friend.
    6. [Jason] In Jacksonville we’re legally required to.
    7. [Chidi] Given the ethical implications of restraining user freedom but also providing safety for the majority of people, we have to take into account several factors [ pulls out a blackboard, stomach ache intensifies ]…





  • It’s theoretically possible under ideal conditions but probably not practical.

    There is a maximum hop count of 7 which means there can be, at absolute maximum, seven nodes between the sender and recipient. The default, though, is 3 hops.

    While the radios may, in theory, be able to work at the range of “a few states over” as the crow flies, terrain, structures, and line of sight would likely prohibit them from working in practice at such distances. You’d also need a reliable series of hops to reach from you to them. Again, at those distances, you’d very likely exceed the maximum hop count pretty quickly.

    From what I’ve seen, large meshes are generally regional.

    There’s a way to join meshes over the internet via MQTT but I haven’t messed with setting that up and in some cases it can potentially overwhelm a local mesh.


  • My knowledge is incomplete as to what powers and restrictions you get with an amateur license, but I think the only real reason you’d want to use HAM mode in the US is if you wanted to operate on US 433 or maybe the 868 MHz block. Not sure if HAMs have access to the latter one or not, though. The 915 block is pretty permissive here for unlicensed use, so that’s usually sufficient.

    Also, if a node is operating in HAM mode, it may not be able to mesh with other nodes not in HAM mode due to encryption being disabled. I could be wrong about that as I haven’t read into that specifically, but to my knowledge it tracks.


  • AFAIK, you only need to use it in HAM mode if you want to use licensed frequencies, a higher power transmit (assuming the radio supports it; US 915 can transmit up to 1W/30db unlicensed and many radios can only transmit at 22db max), or to go beyond the airtime limitations (there no limitations on airtime for US 915). HAM mode also disables encryption if I recall. Also AFAIK, you’re not required to use HAM mode just because you are a licensed HAM operator.

    Sources: Have read the docs but am not a licensed HAM.