Mesh networking in Brown County

[KC9YGK]

Hello,
Is there any interest in having a mesh network functioning in Brown County? I notice some of the posts are pretty aged here. I'd be willing to get the hardware and host a node for whatever, but I'm not sure if I'm a lot of help way out in Suamico.

[kb9mwr]

I've tried a number of things over the years. Basically you need to have access to a number of good sites (100 ft) or you really aren't going to get the stuff to go very far. The terrain here vs elsewhere is pretty flat, and we have some pretty good mature trees. Without getting above the trees you are talking coverage in terms of a block or two. I have been witness to a link from a roof top in Denmark (no near trees) to Pulaski at 200 feet. It's interesting to play with, but don't expect to get a lot of distance without decent sites.

[KC9YGK]

The terrain is certainly an issue here. I've looked at what it would take to use 900 MHz or even something more exotic like Lora (though that would basically just packet radio the slower way). There used to be some good Ubiquiti hardware out for 900MHz but I'm not sure if it's supported anymore - or even if there would be considerable extra distance.

[kb9mwr]

A couple years ago WPS changed out everyones electric and gas meters. They use 900 MHz, so that band is pretty noisy now.

Even prior to this I wasn't able to get much further on 900 MHz until I added amplifiers. The lower you go in frequency the larger the fresnel zone, so I am not meeting that, and there is a lot of multipath so there is a lot of jitter (erratic RTT times) on the links.

Haven't tried the LoRA stuff yet, but have been thinking about it.

[KC9YGK]

Lora seems to be the way to go at this point, but I'm still looking for a good stick to test with. I guess I'm less concerned with having a high speed network vs the experimentation with long distance networking.