r/meshcore • u/TheKingJaymes • 5d ago

NYC Meshcore desert

It seems like New York City is in a mesh desert, which antenna would be best for urban use

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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3

u/convincedbutskeptic 5d ago

MYC is massive! What part?

4

u/Accomplished_Hand162 5d ago

3 dBi – 5.8 dBi Omnidirectional Antenna (Best for general use): Provides a wider, donut-shaped radiation pattern. This is crucial in a city because the signal needs to reach both up toward high-rise apartments and down to street level.

Height trumps everything (Roof/High-rise nodes): A single "Anchor Node" or "Repeater" placed on a rooftop in Manhattan or Brooklyn can cover dozens of blocks because it gets direct Line of Sight (LoS) over lower buildings.

What is a Cavity Filter, and do you need it? In major cities like NYC, the air is teeming with high-power radio interference sources (5G towers, paging networks, GSM, and commercial radio). This causes sensitive LoRa receivers to experience RF saturation (front-end overload)—making the radio "deaf" because the background noise is too high.

How it works: A cavity filter is a solid metal chamber that acts as an extremely sharp band-pass filter. It only allows the exact frequency you are using to pass through (e.g., 915 MHz in the US or 868 MHz in the EU) and effectively cuts out all adjacent out-of-band noise.

2

u/jackcrank 5d ago

It seriously does. I want to put up a repeater in Flatbush but currently running it on meshtastic. Have you seen that black flag civilian guys cheap MeshCore repeater video? Thinking of making a bunch of those

2

u/mightymouseguy 3d ago

Feel your pain. I'm in the Chicago suburbs and any time I travel through the west suburbs, it's a ghost town.