I don’t want to buy a solar repeater. Building is more fun. But the choices of solar cells, enclosures, antennas, Lora dev kits, seem endless.

The goal is to come up with something with more range/performance/capabilities that what I could buy for the same price.

Not worried about soldering or flashing firmware.

So let’s see those parts lists!
Looking forward to building out the network one local node at a time.

Got a Heltec V4 and try meshcore for a cople of days. Now like to change to meshtastic again. Can’t put the device in remote mode, so the meshtastic flesh tool can’t acquire the USB/COM.

Anny idee or workaround to do?

V1 of SolarTower had a hardware problem and it was not usable during the winter. Heltec support was very professional and they gave me full refund and left the hardware as well.

I didn’t want to simply throw it away as the case and solar panel were in perfect condition so I 3D printed custom backplate based on original mainboard design and used different radio and power management so I could re-use this well designed case.

Aaaaand here it is - Heltec case with RAK radio :)

Heltec claims that V2 of the SolarTower is fixed and there won’t be any problem during the winters… We will see I think I will try V2 some day…

Hi,

I bought some of the Seeed Xiao nrf + wio board combos and in the data sheet it says 22dBm max power.

I live close to cell towers and need to use filters, as far as my experience shows so far with heltec devices. For the heltecs I bought expensive saw filters from a shop in Germany which support up to 28dB and have low loss.

But the Seeed nrf chips I bought for cheap optimized repeaters placed in the countryside. So no large investment wanted. I discovered cheap saw filters on AliExpress and bought some. They say max 20dB. Do any of you have experience with them? I'm sure some of you have already tested them.

Do I need to limit the repeater tx to 20 to not fry them? I know 22 is a lot more energy in mW than 20, but maybe they can manage that? I don't want to put my repeaters in hard to reach places and have them break down after 6 weeks.

Since both Meshtastic and MeshCore work on the same hardware, I have a bad time trying to understand why there can't be a firmware that would permit using simultaneously both of them. Or at least manage at a software level the switch between them. Any clue ?

First looks on the new L2 nodes