Off-Tower Site Selection

Nevada is full of radio towers, from AlertWildfire cameras and mine sites to state DOT compounds and commercial repeaters. We partner with tower owners constantly and we are grateful for the access they give us. A tower compound is often the right place to start thinking about a site, and it is not always where we finish.

Mark Spencer pointed out something obvious once I heard it said out loud. These are roughly thirty-dollar radios, and proper RF isolation would push the price well over two hundred dollars. They ship without that luxury, and they are sensitive to interference from bigger signals nearby.

LoRa is designed to work below the noise floor on purpose, and that is what makes low-cost mesh deployment possible. It also means a small node can be drowned out when it sits in the wash from high-power gear on a commercial mast. Cavity filters and amplifiers help most when your radio is already inside proper Faraday isolation. Without that, they do not terminate in a quiet environment. They isolate and amplify for a moment, and then the front end is noisy again on the other side.

Placement is not just height and line of sight. Sometimes the best spot is a few steps down the hill, behind a rock or berm, or on a neighboring peak where we can get similar permission. Being on the tower is often better than being near it but not on it, and near the tower without being on it can be one of the worst places for a janknode because you inherit the RF environment without the height advantage.

I have had good luck using a tower site as a starting point and then walking the perimeter until distant nodes show up on the neighbor list. That might mean fifty meters to the high point behind the compound, or BLM ground outside the fence when RF and permission allow. On the I-80 east leg we placed Miriam on BLM ground outside the High Sierra compound because in-facility placement was deaf to the neighbors we needed. Tower colocation is a great answer when it aligns with the link budget and the landlord is willing, and when it does not align, stepping away is engineering rather than ingratitude.

Commercial sites are built for point-to-point work with microwave dishes, licensed backhaul, and cameras on a mast engineered for a specific load. MeshEnvy needs omni coverage in the gaps between those links, which is a different job, and tower operators do their job well. We are building something adjacent to it, not instead of it.

At every candidate we walk the perimeter and ask where we hear Fox, Poito, or whichever neighbor actually matters, rather than whether we can see the tower. No desk tool beats walking around with my hand raised like the Statue of Liberty until the spot is obvious, and I am willing to repeat that process as many times as the site requires. We stake on fence clamps, T-posts, outbuilding roofs, or BLM ground outside the fence when it wins on RF, because that is a deployment model we can repeat without climbers and rigging schedules that do not match a volunteer nonprofit on a Saturday.

When we ask a tower owner for permission, we sometimes frame it as starting on the fence and earning our way up later. That helps the conversation, though it does not mean the fence is always the best radio spot.

Peaky Finders and our Nevada preset hold hundreds of sites, and those rows are inventory and overlap rather than marching orders. Peaky picks candidate peaks and hop paths at the desk. We also have a field tool planned that would automate more of the walking-around process and map the best locations on site, likely as part of an eventual MeshEnvy field planning app. That is not shipped yet, and for now nothing beats walking the ground yourself. Mark Spencer is exploring an article on using a simulated digital radio (SDR) to visualize the interference patterns we are describing here. The loop today is desk plan with Peaky, ground proof on foot, then stake.

Tower operators and facility managers know their sites better than we ever will, and we need their gates, their combos, and their patience with a nonprofit on a fence line. Start from the ridge and the link budget, use tower access when it helps, and walk the ground until the neighbor list looks right.