Repeaters

A repeater’s whole job is receiving and retransmitting to extend coverage — it doesn’t originate its own chat traffic, it just relays everyone else’s.

Placement: elevation beats power

The single biggest lever for a repeater’s usefulness isn’t its transmit power — it’s how high up it sits. LoRa’s receive sensitivity is good enough that a well-placed repeater on high ground consistently beats a maxed-out radio down in a valley. If you only get to optimize one thing, optimize height and line of sight, not dBm.

A few siting principles that hold up in practice:

• Don’t stack repeaters close together. Two repeaters covering the same area waste range and can interfere with each other — spread coverage out instead.
• Point directional antennas at actual gaps, not at each other or at areas already covered by a neighboring repeater.
• Line of sight matters more than straight-line distance. A repeater with a clear view of the horizon will usually outperform one that’s technically closer but blocked by trees, buildings, or terrain — something to keep in mind across Texas’s mix of flat plains, hill country, and urban cores.

See Antennas for how gain and antenna type factor into all this.

Power and solar sizing

Most repeater sites don’t have grid power nearby, so solar is the default. How much panel you need depends heavily on the board:

• nRF52840-based boards (e.g. RAK4631) are the more power-efficient option — a 5W panel can run one 24/7, though 8–10W gives comfortable margin for cloudy stretches.
• ESP32-based boards draw more power and generally want a 10W+ panel for reliable round-the-clock operation.

Pair the panel with a battery for overnight and overcast operation — a repeater that goes dark every night isn’t much of a repeater.

Remote management

Repeaters are typically headless — no screen, no keyboard — and are managed remotely over the mesh itself via a paired companion radio, rather than requiring physical access. That’s what makes deploy-and-forget installations at hard-to-reach sites (rooftops, towers, remote hilltops) practical in the first place.

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Want message storage and a local bulletin board instead of pure relay? See Room Servers — the same siting and power guidance above applies there too. Thinking about putting a repeater up? MeshTexas is actively looking for good sites — see Host a Node for what’s involved. And mesh101.com has a hands-on device catalog worth browsing if you’re comparing specific hardware.