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 Journal Square, 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, providing coverage to much of downtown Jersey City, Communipaw, and even parts of Brookfield Place and Brooklyn. With a clear view of several routers it helps route around some of the towers.

Hardware

The current node configuration:

• Heltec V4.3
• 6 MHz-wide 913.875 MHz-centered cavity filter
• 10 feet of XRDS-RF KMR400 cable
• L-com 6 dBi antenna

Software

A custom aggregation service collects data from the various sensors and dispatches the data via another custom python server running on a Raspberry Pi. This server tranmits 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 on channel Wx, key WQ==. It additionally sends an Open Meteo forecast message about 30 minutes before sunrise, and max-hop noonday cannon and midnight snore blasts, as whimsical propagation beacons.

Legacy counterpart

CmWx LF is a RAK WisBlock 4631 with 5 dBi Alfa antenna, co-located with the prime node.

MeshCore

Repeater CmWx is at the same site, also a Heltec V4 with Airframes filter and a Comet KP-20 9 dBi antenna.