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Antennas are magic
This is another post in my antenna series, written for everyone growing
a mesh in a small town (big town as well) and hitting the same problem I did:
big distances between nodes, awkward locations, or (like me) sitting in a total
radio-silent pit.
We can’t crank up the power on the unlicensed band, so the only real lever left is
the antenna. And that’s exactly where the frustration begins.
My Meshtastic Antenna Test “Failed” with a 35 dB Jump
Meshtastic (or really any radio experimenting) has a habit of humbling you the moment you
think you’ve figured it out, especially when you start messing with antennas.
I thought I had cracked the code. Swap the stock lipstick antenna for a homemade measuring-tape
dipole and boom, RSSI jumped +35 dB. Thousands of times more signal strength! I was ready to
declare antenna upgrades the ultimate Meshtastic hack.
Then reality hit!
Meshtastic FAQs – Part I
Being part of the Meshtastic community for a while, I’ve seen the same questions come up
again and again. This is the start of a short FAQ-style blog series where I’ll gather those
common headaches, expand on the usual short forum replies, and add the extra context that
actually helps. These posts will also be added to the website’s Docs/FAQ section.
Let’s get you connected.
Antennas, SWR, and Impedance
When I first started measuring antennas for Meshtastic, I had a simple belief:
Low SWR = good antenna.
That belief isn’t wrong - but it’s incomplete. What changed things for me wasn’t reading more theory.
It was putting different antennas on a NanoVNA, one after another, and seeing how wildly different they
looked behind the SWR number.
Meshtastic Beginners Guide - What do you want to do?
A while ago I wrote a blog about why I chose Meshtastic as my solution space - a playground in which
I experiment, learn, and occasionally fail in interesting ways. In this article, I want to focus more on
why Meshtastic is such a powerful learning platform, while also pointing beginners toward
practical starting points, resources, and real-world solutions.
Let’s begin the journey.
Meshtastic Android Integration - My Android MeshHelper?
For many of you who don’t know me, doing nothing is one of the scariest things I can imagine.
I tend to stay busy. So over the Christmas and New Year break, with two weeks off work
(and yes, spending time with family was part of the plan), the question became:
what will I do next?
Over the last few months, I’ve been playing with Android application development, and
naturally I started wondering how I could integrate that with my Meshtastic units.
After spending a few hours reading through the Meshtastic Android code on GitHub,
I came to a fairly quick conclusion: this is solid, well-written code -
and I am not going to rewrite it.
Then I stumbled across a directory called
mesh_service_example. And that’s where things got interesting.