5mo ago

Help getting started?

Hey everyone, I hope this is ok to post here! I've been putting off getting into meshtastic for a while now but the time has come to play around with it. I have done some research but I always like to talk to real people if possible for real world advice and experience, not just youtube salesman and AI top ten lists. I have minimal experience with radio, but some.

As to meshtastic the research I've done has pointed me to a few LoRa boards, the heltec t114 v2, and the Lilygo t-beam, and also the Lilygo T-deck plus.

I really would love to have a phoneless standalone set up, but have seen some stuff about the T-deck lacking good firmware and so it isn't "ready," but then I've seen some people say to the contrary that some good firmware exists now. Are there other better phoneless devices for meshtastic? Is the t-deck good enough now that I could pick that up now and add some t114s later to expand the network? Or should I go with a couple t114s, and wait til phoneless matures a little?

As for the phone using set ups, are there other boards I should look at instead of the t114 and the t-beam? I do require either it to come with a case or have available .stl files to print one, I suck at CAD.

My final questions are to the antennas, is there an antenna manufacturer that is commonly recommended for meshtastics (915 khz), and am I looking for SMA female or SMA male connectors on the antenna, or does that depend on the board in question? I tried searching the product page for the heltec board and SMA isn't mentioned anywhere according to ctrl+f. I see some kits with an antenna on amazon, but they don't mention either and I'm sure I'll want to upgrade the dinky rubber ducky it comes with.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, double thanks if you responded, triple thanks if you have answers or any helpful links! I'm excited to be getting into the hobby here soon, and glad there's already a lemmy comm for it!

27 comments

For your antenna question, if the board doesn't have a normal sma connector then it'll probably have a U.FL connector on the pcb that you can connect an sma pigtail, which you'll attach to the case (if the pigtail doesn't come with the board then a generic one works fine). Any normal SMA antenna for 915MHz will work, so just pick one based on the DB rating while keeping in mind that the higher DB rating ones are usually bigger. I got a RAK and it came with a tiny U.FL Lora antenna so I replaced it with a pigtail and a 10dBi antenna.
As for male/female, antennas are usually sma male and the pigtails will be sma female, some antennas come with a U.FL pigtail so it's hard to go wrong with those.
- Thanks! The LoRa boards I was looking at (not tdeck ofc) seem to have the pigtail set up and a 2 dBi antenna, so I'll pick up a 10dBi with whatever I order!
  
  Just keep in mind that anything above 3 dBi is going to be directional. A 10 dBi is very directional, so unless it's a fixed antenna and you have very little elevation change between stations I'd go with a 3 or 2.5 dBi omni antenna.
Hello! I have a T-deck so I can share some of my experiences with it as far as it being ready or not for primary use. First, the fancy UI is currently in an experimental state and it's not easily flashable like other hardware is. There is a precompiled build on the net somewhere but it is ~5 months old at this point and crashes a lot. When it is working it works well enough, some things aren't implemented yet like the map though.
- Thanks for the answers! I know there's at least two firmwares for the T-deck that you can choose when you order, the meshtastic firmware and the lilygo factory firmware, and then one on github by "seanpm2001," which one are you referring to here as fancy, seanpm2001?
  I have some experience flashing stuff to things and could compile something from github (maybe with a little instructions lol) but I think with the missing features I'm leaning towards going with a phone-using option at first and coming back to the phoneless after some development, thanks for the advice!
  
  I'm talking about the tft-gui-work branch of the meshtastic firmware repository.
- MUI is what they're talking about. The plans for official public release are to drop it alongside the new next-hop routing protocol. This should be pretty soon, likely 2.6
Welcome! I'm a n00b but I'm having fun so far, and I'm interested in the responses you get here as I'm learning as I go!
I am very keen on standalone devices that don't need a phone to function but haven't explored that functionality as yet. I got a bunch of T1000-E's for giving to local friends to test with and as an EDC, and a Station G2 as a home base station (haven't got a keyboard for it yet but with that it becomes standalone with the canned message module). The T1000-E is super easy to set up and good to demo to people who aren't too techy that might be interested. The station g2 needs more power but comes with a pretty good stock antenna. I've ordered a couple of the SenseCAP Indicators (currently backordered) as they look like they miiight be standalone(?) with the advanced firmware which doesn't have a release date yet, and look fun even if not.
We only have a small mesh of 3 in our little town but my two friends are both into radio and way more experienced than me, and I think they are both impressed with the ease of use, and one is super keen and going to get a Station G2 as he can use it for HAM stuff too as he is licensed.
- Thanks for showing me the G2 and sensecap indicator, these things look pretty neat! I'll definitely be looking at those once I'm a bit more into it, for now I'm thinking about a t1000-e and maybe a couple t114 v2s (or maybe a couple t1000-es and one t114 v2, who knows! Lol). I do like how pocket sized the t1000-e is but I worry about the non-upgradable nature (antenna, battery), but then someone here said they hit a repeater with it 4mi away! I'm sure that repeater is up in a tower or something to get that range, but still, hitting it with an internal antenna like that is damn impressive, so it may be fine!
  As for the indicator being standalone I'm not sure it's the one for me in that particular application, I'm basically looking for a blackberry or even nokia 3310 lol, with no SIM/CDMA radio and a LoRa radio instead (and GPS, full functionality of a meshtastic device ykwim), and I can use it to send/read messages directly like texting. A boy can dream!
  
  For their size the T1000-E's are impressive, I think for many people they are the most practical EDC but folks will often have something else as a base station on their roof.
  It would be very cool if someone were to release a mobile phone with LoRa built in.

27 comments