I’ve been dabbling with AREDN the last several weeks. I’m not really an emcom guy, but I did want to dabble with the mesh stuff, and in my particular use case, it seemed like it might be a fun way to send my Radio Rocket’s data ‘back home’ instead of using a cellular hot spot and paying for data. I figure AREDN is a way I can do my dabbling, but maybe be of some use to the emcom folx by at least filling in a bit of a coverage hole if they need it, since there are no nodes around me, and I do have some limited emergency power at my disposal if needed.
Even though the mesh stuff is mostly line of site, I think I should still be in good shape, because of our 4 primary launch sites, one definitely has a line of site shot back home, one of them probably should, and one of them might. The 4th is probably a no-go for direct line of site, but I do have access to a TV tower on a family member’s property to add a relay node if needed…
Anyway, I haven’t done anything terribly exciting yet to really share, other then just getting my first 2 nodes set up. My only advice is to maybe avoid the TP-Link CPE210 devices. It may have been user error, but I fought with one until I gave up :-). For the 2 nodes that I got running, the GL.iNet AR300M16-ext device I got to be the mobile node was wild easy to set up, and the Mikrotik Basebox that I set up for my home node went pretty much according to directions, after being extremely careful about making sure I had the most recent nightly build of the firmware, and followed the directions exactly. (Imagine that!)
I may share more stuff on the project in the future, but for now I threw up a new static page with info on my nodes that folx can check out if they’re curious.
Thanks for stopping by!