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Coax Cable Selection Guide The coaxial cable connecting your LoRa radio to its antenna is a critical component that directly subtracts from your link budget. Every decibel of cable loss is a decibel less of received signal and, equivalently, a decibel less of ...

RF Connectors for LoRa Hardware RF connector incompatibility is one of the most common and frustrating problems when assembling LoRa mesh hardware. Knowing which connectors are standard on which hardware and understanding adapter losses will save hours of trou...

Minimizing Feedline Loss Feedline loss is the silent enemy of RF system performance. Unlike antenna gain (which you buy) or transmit power (which you set), feedline loss just silently destroys the performance you already have. This page provides the tools to q...

Antenna Mounting Best Practices Proper antenna mounting is the difference between a node that stays up through storms and one that fails or becomes a hazard. This page covers mechanical considerations, materials, and installation techniques for outdoor LoRa me...

Grounding and Lightning Protection A properly grounded and surge-protected antenna installation protects people, equipment, and buildings from the destructive effects of direct lightning strikes and the more common (but still damaging) induced transients from ...

The Three Rules of Repeater Placement Every successful LoRa mesh deployment rests on three placement rules. Violate any one of them and the network will under-perform regardless of hardware quality, antenna gain, or software tuning. Rule 1 - Height Above Te...

The Radio Horizon Formula The theoretical radio horizon for a single antenna at height h metres above a smooth spherical earth is: d (km) = 3.57 × √h_m For a link between two antennas at heights h₁ and h₂ the total radio horizon is: d_total (km) = 3.57 × (...

Link Budget Explained A link budget is an accounting of all the gains and losses in an RF communication link from transmitter to receiver. It tells you whether a link will work, by how much margin, and what changes would improve it. Every successful LoRa mesh ...

Why a Grid Approach? Ad-hoc repeater placement - putting nodes wherever a willing host can be found - produces uneven coverage with clusters of overlapping repeaters in some areas and dead zones in others. A systematic grid approach starts from coverage requi...

Fresnel Zones and Clearance One of the most common causes of unexpectedly poor radio links is obstruction of the Fresnel zone - not just the line of sight. Even when two antennas have a clear geometric line of sight to each other, a rooftop, hilltop, or dense ...

Why Single-Path Mesh Is Fragile A tree-topology mesh - where each node has exactly one path back to the network core - is the natural shape that forms when coverage is barely adequate. In a tree topology, the failure of any interior node partitions the networ...

Interference and Noise at 915 MHz The 902 - 928 MHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) band is shared with a wide variety of devices that can interfere with LoRa mesh operation. Understanding who shares this band, how their signals manifest, and how to ...

What Is a Hop? A hop is a single radio transmission between two adjacent nodes. When a message originates at Node A and is received by Node B, that is one hop. If Node B re-transmits the message and Node C receives it, that is a second hop. Each re-transmissi...

Link Budget Through Multiple Hops In a multi-hop chain, each individual link (hop) must have a positive link margin. Unlike a wired network where signal is regenerated cleanly at each switch, a LoRa repeater decodes the incoming RF signal and re-transmits at ...

Best Hardware for Beginners Choosing your first LoRa mesh node is one of the most important decisions you will make as a new mesh networking enthusiast. The wrong board can mean weeks of frustration with driver problems, dead-on-arrival USB chips, or - most pa...

A portable LoRa mesh node needs to fit in your pocket, run for a full day on battery, display incoming messages without requiring your phone, and work reliably in the field. This page compares the top portable options and helps you match hardware to your speci...

A fixed repeater node has one job: forward mesh packets reliably, indefinitely, with as little power consumption as possible. This page covers the hardware decisions that matter most for solar-powered or battery-backed repeater deployments. The Core Decision:...

Two microcontroller platforms dominate the LoRa mesh hardware landscape: Espressif's ESP32 family and Nordic Semiconductor's nRF52840. Both are capable, both are well-supported by Meshtastic and MeshCore firmware, and both pair with the SX1262 radio. But they ...