Anzio Catterick commissioned and the mysterious YM-Catterick discovered on the MeshCore internet map

The Anzio Catterick repeater is now commissioned, though it will be coming down for an antenna swap in a few weeks as all it is using right now is a Paradar indoor antenna which should be OK for now, however this repeater has now established linking to Manchester at best, a repeater on the far side of Manchester (Warrington direction from what I can tell from map information) advertised on flood and worked its way through the mesh to myself, a trip of 69 miles(!) which is certainly not bad at all.

Also tonight I discovered the existence of "YM-Catterick", this is a repeater that according to the map is randomly deployed in some woodland at the Scotton and Tunstall end of Catterick but this might not be its actual location, but I am aware it is there and it will help add to the Richmondshire Mesh a lot and help the mesh expand beyond Richmondshire, as I write this I have not heard a peep out of it ping wise, but it has been routing traffic as "<unknown repeater>", of course as soon as it flood adverts then Anzio Catterick will see it as a zero-hop neighbour, default flood advertisement times are usually every 3 hours, direct is either disabled or at least hourly, if you are reading this and are the owner of "YM Catterick" I would love to hear from you and I am monitoring the public channel so please do say hi and we can have a chat there.

Anyway, that's all for this update to the mesh operations, I'll hope to catch you on the mesh very soon

Anzio Catterick repeater tested in situ

The Anzio Catterick repeater made it on air in what will be its permanent home, the radio hardware currently only has an antenna meant for indoor use on it but when it went up I was hearing station adverts from Easingwold, Bradford and Huddersfield, along with some activity in the public channel for the first time since my brief chat with Andy M1SDE (who has also set up a repeater as I discovered on an Amateur radio club night out on the 20th August but at his home QTH which is in a bit of an awkward location so I never heard an advert from it via the Anzio Catterick repeater when I put this up).

The repeater was removed from location after about an hour because I was not convinced the way I had mounted it was going to be safe so I am going to work on this and get it back up to test overnight and see what happens, also a wander arouund town once it is up to see where I can get into it, granted we're getting to that time of year where the weather is starting to get a bit rubbish I think it's worth a test, I will repeat the test when I swap the antenna over when I can get hold of one.

While it was and still is my intention to establish a local mesh in the area if I can connect to other neighbouring meshes then that is certainly a good thing because the wider the coverage of MeshCore as a whole the better it is especially if disaster strikes such as a nationwide power cut because these devices run of batteries with charging via solar panels and powerbanks, I have been informed that there is work on a link between West Yorkshire and Manchester and I am aware that there is a repeater on Winter Hill where a broadcast transmitter is also located, but for obvious reasons (Arqiva being a greedy bunch and wanting £1000s a day in rent per transmitter as well as the high output of the broadcast transmitters) a MeshCore repeater wouldn't be on that mast unless it had some seriously good filtering which is a complicated subject delving into RF engineering, but it would be great to chat to people over in Manchester and possibly over to Cheshire and Merseyside, maybe even the Fylde Coast, from right here in sunny (or not so sunny) Yorkshire, worth thinking about that.