I’ve previously played about with Meshtastic. I run two Meshtastic nodes from my home as permanent infrastructure contributing to the mesh on the South Coast. Currently this consists of two Heltec V3 nodes, one configured with an omni-directional antenna and one with a directional antenna pointing a a hilltop near my home.

This configuration was built when there were few other nodes in my area however this has changed and the directional node has become redundant and has been shut down for many months.

So I thought what else could I do with this now redundant part of my infrastructure? An interesting project is TinyGS. TinyGS combines an MQTT server with the same LoRa modules commonly used in Meshtastic to receive data from LoRa satellites in space.

Initially I planned to simply re-purpose my existing 868MHz module in my system for TinyGS however I discovered that there are few satellites operating in this band. Instead I will replace it with a 433 module which combined with a simple antenna should perform well.

So far I have installed the TinyGS software and I have a test module sat on my desk connected to a discone antenna on the roof. The setup is far from optimal but seems to be working! You can see the results here. Once I get some free time I will install this permanently on the mast with the Meshtastic nodes and do a proper write up on how to build a TinyGS ground station!