Meschore Continues

It's been a busy few weeks, including getting to grips with Meshcore and its various elements.

Luckily, there's a repeater within line-of-sight - just - of me and this helps develop the interest. Slowly, more repeaters are appearing across Anglesey and, come summer, this may well pick up significantly.

Attention in the past couple of weeks has turned to antennas. At home, a window-placed test 8.5dBi collinear from Paradar has proved to work perfectly well, although it doesn't really offer any advantage in what can be heard in practice over what the stock stubby antenna was delivering. Not really planning to stay at this property much longer, I've resisted putting this antenna outside and stuck it in the loft instead. It does OK there.

With one unit tied up in the loft, I decided to buy a Heltec V3 with GPS and a 3-D printed case, so that I could shove it in a rucksack and take up the mountains - or just a hill overlooking the Irish Sea on Anglesey. The weather being so wet, though, I haven't managed to get out to do this!

Instead, I've been testing the handheld unit out on my daily walk around the local reservoir, which is surrounded by a relatively narrow strip of conifer trees, which of course have pretty dense branches and needles - very effective in blocking microwaves!

 

The only place I could get a signal from the handheld's stubby antenna to my home was from an old railway embankment across a lake that has a relatively clear line-of-sight path (orange and turquoise positions, both at ~2km). From any position on the dam (pink and white positions), which has a path through 250m of conifers and also lies behind a low hill on which they grow, I couldn't get a signal back home with the stubby. 

Line-of-sight (terrain) map for the dam. LoS is only in the clear areas, free of dark lines (the upper end of the lake isn't correct, because it fails to properly take into account the effect of the trees).

 

I felt I could do better than this, despite the very low power involved (22dBm, or 160mW). 

So I built a simple 1/4 wave vertical with four sloping radials, based on a N-type panel mount socket with a SMA connector on the other side. I simply soldered the radiator into the centre of the N-type and attached the radials to the panel mount holes. With a bit of trimming, I got a nice matching curve with about 1.25:1 SWR. It's probably best to grind the thread mounting down to the level of the centre pin socket, or slightly below it, to avoid the lowest few mm of the radiator being somewhat inside a grounded surround of metal. I fixed the whole thing to a timber stick using a 15mm PVC pipe clip, into which the N-type screw thread mount fits snugly.

The Heltec v3 attached to its stick-mounted vertical.

 

So, looking more of a nerd than ever, off I went for a walk with the handheld, but now connected to the new vertical antenna. I was only going to send one test 'advert' signal from the most challenging position - the nearest point on the dam, at 1.8km exactly and through all those trees and a low hill. Would it get through?

Satisfyingly, it very much did! It's no surprise to anyone who has used stock stubby antennas that they are very poor and something to be discarded as soon as possible. And so it is at 868MHz. 

Success! Signal heard back home from the dam.

 

Of course, a PVC tube collinear is more convenient and robust to carry around that a spidery vertical for mountain hiking, for example. But it's also not an impossible antenna to carry in your hand or sticking up from the backback.

Very satisfying experiment, costing no more than the price of a N-type-to-SMA panel mount connector.

Incidentally, at the moment, you can save yourself well over £20 if you buy the same ~6dBi collinear from McGill Microwave Systems rather than the popular Paradar outlet. 

 

 

 

Meshcore: overcoming the issues

Yes, I'm still alive!

I recently started experimenting with Meshtastic - this lasted less than a day - and straight thereafter onto the much better Meshcore 868MHz network.

Though I live in what is to many a 'remote' area, with not that many active radio people about, I was surprised to find two repeaters on Anglesey and a couple of client nodes over on the mainland. 

Having kicked-off using just the standard stub antenna, I decided to spend the £68 for a Paradar 8.5dBi antenna (1m-long collinear). This is nicely made, though I'm not entirely persuaded by the sealant on the end caps, which remains unset on receipt. A quick spin with the self-amalgamating tape is therefore advisable. The mild steel bracket supplied is also poor; it will rust to bits in no time, especially in a salty sea air environment like mine. You can currently save yourself about £10 on Paradar's direct-to-consumer site if you buy via E-bay; you get the self-same antenna and DHL delivery (from Germany).

The Heltec V3 was easy to flash and configure as a client, and the Meshcore app connected to it, straight away. It's important to remember that flashing requires you to use Microsoft Edge browser.

I didn't have quite the same easy experience with the V4, which I ordered via E-bay from China (which, as always, arrived in just a few days - quicker than most UK sellers can manage!)

The problem I had was largely one of ignorance. Firstly, the V4 I have needs its 'User' button (the top one) pressed on powering-up in order to put it into flashing mode. Once I understood that, flashing via the Meshcore online site was simple enough. 

Where I had a day of scratching my head was: why couldn't I connect to the flashed V4 immediately after this process, which used the exact-same serial (USB-C) connection, in order to configure it?

Turns out that it's a matter of rather clunky sequencing: you put the unit into flashing mode with the 'User' button, do the flashing, disconnect the V4, then reconnect it in the normal sense, such that it powers-up, goes through its 'Please wait' thing and then displays the repeater settings for a while. When the screen went blank, I clicked on 'Configure via USB' on the flasher site (I left the flashing page open and didn't touch it until the Heltec's screen was clear). I then got the configuration screen and I was able to sort everything out.

I used the following settings (you can find out what everyone in your particular area is using from the Meshcore nodes map). You can also just choose 'UK/Narrow' from the app and it will auto-fill the settings for you:

Frequency: 869.618MHz
Bandwidth: 62.5kHz
Coding rate: 8
Spreading factor: 8

This immediately worked and was immediately seen by my client in the other room. I've yet to figure out GPS integration on the V4 board, but that's just a matter of developing enough patience some other day!

Incidentally, using the Paradar antenna at the window, on 30/01/2026, I received a repeater in Greystones, south of Dublin, at 115km! No tropo, no line-of-sight. This was either an aircraft reflection or someone who had come across to Wales on the ferry, setting off a ping or two on Anglesey, having not changed their repeater settings. I will have to try and communicate with the owner to find out!

I later discovered why my repeater wasn't sending periodic flood notifications; I hadn't logged-in to it via the phone app, using the password I'd set. This is very confusing, because if you log in with no password, it lets you do so, but has very few options (because you'd be a guest logger-inner in this case).

When I did log in with the password, I saw I was now logged-in as an admin and all the settings were now available. I still have no idea how to enable the GPS so that's still a wrestle for another day!

NOTE: If you switch off your Meshcore repeater and it has no battery attached, your settings will remain in place on powering-up again, but the repeater's clock won't. So you will need to re-sync the clock from the phone app.