🌤️ Building Toward Spring Deployments
Our fourth Capital Region Mesh meetup brought another strong turnout and moved decisively beyond January’s conceptual discussions. With spring approaching, the group shifted from abstract conceptual planning toward concrete deployment strategies, focusing on power, placement, and communication resilience.
🌲 Solar Tree Nodes in Practice
The evening opened with Alex’s presentation on designing and deploying solar‑powered tree nodes, drawing on lessons from multiple real‑world installations. The talk blended engineering detail with field pragmatism, giving attendees a grounded sense of what it takes to get reliable LoRa coverage into the canopy.
Key insights included:
- Hard‑won tips from several deployments, including what actually fails in the field
- Power supply design, metering approaches, and how to validate hardware assumptions before committing to deployment
- Material choices, antenna selection, and the trade-offs between weight, durability, and performance
- The value of very conservative estimates during the design phase to avoid surprises months later
- Practical rigging and hoisting techniques for safely placing nodes high in trees
- A show‑and‑tell featuring the Rattlesnake Node and the compressed‑air line launcher
🧭 Interactive PACE Planning
After a short break, Sam led an interactive presentation on PACE Planning, introducing the framework and then opening the floor for collaborative refinement. This quickly evolved into a practical workshop, mapping real communication pathways and identifying gaps.
Participants contributed ideas such as:
- Staging neighbor contact information and emergency numbers in accessible, redundant locations
- Establishing SOPs with key communication partners to ensure the first trigger in the chain is clear and actionable
- Creating an #emergency MeshCore room as a shared fallback coordination space
- Developing branded PACE handouts for public outreach, especially for local emergency services and community partners
🛠️ A New Working Group for LoRa Strategy
Following another short break, the meetup transitioned into a working session. The group agreed that the growing number of LoRa experiments, devices, and deployment ideas needed a unified direction.
A LoRa Strategy Working Group was formally established and vested with full authority to:
- Develop a master plan proposal for the community’s LoRa approach
- Evaluate how MeshCore, Meshtastic, and other protocols fit into long‑term regional goals
- Present a cohesive strategy for group adoption at a future meetup
This is the moment to plug in if you want to help decide where our first regional nodes go, how we test them, and what the early mesh actually looks like on the ground.
🌱 Preparing to Get Our Hands Dirty
The February meetup marked a clear shift from theory into practice. Fieldcraft, planning, and community all came together as we began laying the foundations for real deployments rather than just modeling them on paper. With spring around the corner, the work done this month sets the stage for hands‑on experimentation, hardware in trees, and the first steps toward a functioning regional mesh.
Next month’s session will push that shift further as the LoRa working group unveils the first draft of a coordinated regional deployment plan — a roadmap that will guide where we place hardware, how we test it, and how the mesh begins to take shape across the region.
Full details, including upcoming agenda items, are available on the March 2026 Meetup page.