So, I'm scratching my head, and hoping someone here can help, or have had a similar experience?
I live at 500msl in a small rural town of about 300 people. Started experimenting about a month ago and have a few T1000-E's and a station g2. The waterproof enclosure I ordered for the g2 finally arrived a few days ago and it's now up on a modest pole attached to my house (about 4m high), signal is much better and we only have 3 regular members of our mesh at this stage (still testing before advertising to locals).
Even before raising the g2, we'd had a few times when a couple of nodes would appear for a few hours in the early hours of the morning. We are in an area popular with hiking and 4wders so this isn't particularly unlikely especially as these are given as ideal use cases for Meshtastic, and sometimes people do get up early for this kind of thing!
But last night, we had an absolute explosion of nodes in the early hours. All had gps locations of around a very specific area on the coast, approximately 180km away as the crow flies. I think one or two of them had been seen before but I'd wiped my nodeDB a few times since then so not completely sure.
The similarity to previous times when we saw a few nodes in early hours, but many more (with g2 higher, makes sense regardless of how), makes me wonder now if something atmospheric is happening.
Could this be tropospheric ducting? If so has anyone managed to actually communicate with this kind of connection over MT?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation
I agree with the plane theory, one time my nodes were hopping to a plane and reaching nodes in Canada with the farthest node reached being 115mi/185km
As far as I know the frequencies Meshtastic plays with doesn't really do anything crazy when it comes to propogation. That's why good line of sight is so vital
Hmm. When you've hopped a plane, have they tended to be a cluster of nodes? I guess if it was a node on a flight from a particular airport it's maybe possible... I need to go look at flight info, we're not in an area with much air traffic at all, and the time frames don't make sense, how could they keep refreshing for hours? ๐ค And the time of day, there's just not usually flights occurring in the middle of the night here either.
You can look at ADSB history to see if a plane was in the area then
For me the initial signal from the plane was at 30k ft and about 40 miles away.