Work

I am currently splitting time between Remote Ham Radio and TRMNL.

At RHR, the migration from Flex to Icom radios continues. 26 down, 32 to go. Not a lot else to report - it’s business as usual.

At TRMNL, work continues to streamline the firmware development process. The number of open PRs is steadily declining, particularly the open-source contributions from our users. There have been some bumps along the way, but that’s expected with a faster release cadence. Things will improve over time, especially now that I have some free time to begin shoring up code quality.

MeshCore

MeshCore was the theme (obsession?) of this month. A friend finally convinced me to get into the hobby, which is exploding right now. Connecticut has an especially active community, with hundreds of nodes spread across our tiny state. On weekends we regularly chat with folks from NJ, PA, NH, and MA.

I live in a rural area, so even the closest repeaters are too weak to be received by a companion node indoors. We’re in a dead zone. I made it my mission to fill in the gap, both for myself and to extend the reach of the mesh into less-populated areas. If you build it, etc. etc.

Luckily, part of our property is on a hill, with some decent elevation and line-of-sight to nearby repeaters. I bought a Heltec MeshTower V2, mowed a path to the back of our land, and erected a 20’ military mast tripod. After all that work and expenditure, I officially joined the mesh.

First impressions? It’s fine. There are still a lot of problems.

• One-way communications: Very often, I only see one half of a conversation, or bits and pieces of one. There are a lot of factors that could be causing this, such as (a) airtime collisions causing dropped packets (there are no retries or ACKs for channel messages), (b) sparse network coverage, or (c) mismatched transmitter power (a 1W node can be heard better than a 100 mW node) or antenna gain.
• Unreliable DMs: Even for private messages which have retry and ACK functionality, there are still problems with some messages being duplicated, and some not arriving at all.
• Discussion: What do you talk about with randos? It’s mostly “good morning mesh” and “test” messages.

For now, this hobby is firmly in the “playing with radios” camp. It’s not robust or reliable enough to be used for true decentralized communication, especially in any sort of emergency. But it’s really fun to see what people are DIY’ing, and to have unexpected chats with folks several states away, especially when there’s ducting going on. The firmware is growing and evolving quickly, so I have confidence that things will improve.

Garage Remodel

We are past the halfway point with our garage remodel. The walls and ceiling are painted, new LED lighting is installed, a leaky foundation crack was sealed, and all the junk is out. The floors will be redone this month, and then there are some finishing touches before we start moving back in.

Kitties!

Lily and River are growing so quickly. They have been (mostly) well-behaved.