pond aeration and water pumping.

I sent a message from just west of Florence SC and it propagated nicely. Oh and the network lit up about the same time. Imagine this network when cell phones are down and the balloon goes up.

Got this one up on a local hospital roof today. One of them is mastastic that’s been there a while and the other is mesh core. Good thing I was there. With them mounted parallel to the building I had low signal strength to the local repeaters. We rotated 30deg and signal strength is excellent now. The little things.

Sorry folks no recent posts... behind the scenes we're working on hurricane shutters for the house. No rush, just always wanted them.

I can tell ya'll this... the meshcore in Sumter / Florence SC is really taking off. The repeater that went up 400ft a few weeks ago died because the solar panel got knocked loose. While I was away, the guys over there climbed again and installed one at 400ft and another at 200ft. We can remotely switch them on and off to see which works best for the area.

There's also one at the intersection of I-95 and I-20 on a hotel about 120ft up.

This may be a little technical for many, but here goes.... when a packet travels meshcore network it can use direct routing where individual repeaters are included in the packet OR "flood" where any repeater that hears your packet will relay it.

Additionally we can add a "scope" to the packet. So I can specify that a packet only bounce around within a region such as "us-sc" or "us-sc-flo". So if my peers in North Carolina don't want my "us-sc" scoped packets they can opt out of that region.

So there's a software setting that says if a scope is NOT specified, we can limit the number of hops. For example, a station in Kentucky sends an unscoped packet and it arrives near my town with 15 hops. If I have set my repeater to only relay packets with 10 hops or less, that packet is NOT relayed into my town.

So by specifying a max unscoped hop count and/or specifying a region to relay, I can effecively limit the amount of traffic in my local area. This will allow for regional and multi state directed commnucations but not allow a spammy free for all. The philosophy is the keep the air as free as possible to allow my local guys great communications.

….and the power is out this morning but not for me.

start a fire!

OK folks... for your viewing pleasure. One of our group members is creating quite a monster system. He's in south Florida so wind is a concern and his daily summer usage is around 180kwh PER DAY. He burns through 50kwh running HVAC from sundown until the early hours of the morning. So, we ran some numbers and he bought 3 pallets of 560w panels and will be placing them in two 30ft x 30ft squares on the ground. Since he needs power in summer, we placed the panels nearly flat.

He's got two 12000xp inverters and 55kw of panels. He's gotta use 600amp busbars. I started him with 64kwh of batteries and he'll use 80% of that each night so the plan is to double that as soon as his system is commissioned.

He decided to replace the meter base outside with a new feed thru combo meterbase / main panel. That way he can have grid only sources of power for heat strips and emergency power to each inverter. There will be a transfer switch inside his basement which will feed his old main panel with the grid or his inverters.

He's combining 3 strings of 8 panels into one MPPT on the 12000xp. That set of 24 panels has it's own PV switch out at the panels. Repeat that 4 times and you have 96 panels. Four runs of AWG 8 feeders back to the house.

So.... here are the pictures of progress so far.