Meshtastic

Station CmWx is a solar-powered 915 MHz LoRa node for Meshtastic, extending the local mesh into the Claremont neighborhood of Jersey City.

Site

The node is rooftop mounted, ~1.5km west of Liberty State Park, on The Hill in the Claremont area overlooking Bergen–Lafeyette, roughly 20 meters above sea level.

Hardware

The current node configuration:

• RAKwireless WisBlock RAK19007 base
• RAKwireless RAK4631 core
• ALFA Network 5 dBi antenna
• a few feet of XRDS-RF KMR400 SMA–N cable to get it up the mast
• ACASOM 915 MHz bandpass filter
• 1× 6 W 5 V PV panel
• 10,000 mAh 3.7 V LiPo battery

The node is configured as a client, since the roof is not nearly high enough to make this a proper router. I chose to not set up this node with the licensed operator configuration so it could support encryption. For now, the node itself does not uplink to MQTT.

TODOs

• PoE for primary power and MQTT uplink capability, also for feeding weather station data to a Wx channel
• enclosure with direct antenna connection and mast mounting to eliminate the coax