TinyGS: Getting Back to Listening
Back in 2020, I bought a few cheap ESP32 boards to experiment with Drone Remote ID Open Source French Drone Identification. It turns out these boards also include an SX1278 LoRa module at 433 MHz.
Here is the board: TTGO T-BEAM
At the time, Meshtastic wasn't really a thing yet. LoRa at 433 MHz doesn't have particularly long-range, and I didn't have a clear use case anyway…
But then I discovered something much more interesting: TinyGS.
TinyGS is an open network of ground stations distributed around the world, designed to receive telemetry from LoRa satellites, weather probes, and other flying objects using cheap and versatile hardware. And of course, the project is FOSS, so I had to give it a try !
I even opened a PR back then: Github PR100 (still open, unfortunately…)
At that time, I was living in the middle of a large city, and I never managed to receive anything, not with the default antenna, nor with a cheap "5 dBi" advertised one.