Meshtastic

Station CmWx is a 33cm-band LoRa node for Meshtastic, extending the local mesh backbone into the Claremont neighborhood of Jersey City and providing an alternate link between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Site

The node is rooftop mounted, ~1.5km west of Liberty State Park, on The Hill in the Claremont area overlooking Bergen–Lafeyette, roughly 22 meters above sea level. It’s relatively low but has a clear view and blasts packets horizontally into the concrete canyons, provides coverage to much of downtown Jersey City, Communipaw, and even parts of Brookfield Place and Brooklyn, and with a clear view of several routers helps route around some of the towers.

Grey antenna in front of the downtown Jersey City and Lower Manhattan skyline.

Hardware

The current node configuration:

NULLHOP MeshToad 1.5 + Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W running meshtasticd
Airframes 906.875 MHz-centered cavity filter
15 feet of XRDS-RF KMR400 cable
Rokland 5.8 dBi large profile antenna

Software

A custom aggregation service collects data from the various sensors and dispatches the data via another custom python server running on the Raspberry Pi. This server dispatches the data as 0-hop environmental telemetry regularly. On the hour, it also sends the telemetry with 1-hop, and sends a text message of the current conditions. It also sends an Open Meteo forecast message about 30 minutes before sunrise, and max-hop noonday cannon and midnight snore blasts, as whimsical propagation beacons.

Test counterpart

Station CmW2 is a Heltec V4 with Airframes filter and L-com antenna, co-located with CmWx, used for testing alternate radio settings and other purposes.

MeshCore

Repeater CmWx is at the same site as the Meshtastic node, running a Station G2 with Airframes filter and ALFA 5 dBi antenna.