this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
1114 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
78705 readers
3546 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I've heard some people just place "guerilla nodes" to extend coverage.
So, I have rolling hills, but every ideal spot has a cell phone mast, I'm thinking they'd notice. There are some power pylons, I think they'd notice as well. Either one of those would probably be a felony.
None of the buildings are tall enough, it's US suburbia. I have a drone, i could probably airdrop a small solar node on a roof.
There's a really large water tower a couple miles away, not LOS, but it would be amazing to help the cause. But again, I don't think that would go over well and i'm not fond enough of heights to install it.
Tree?
A tree would be neat, how the heck do you get solar to it though?
I need do some experiments with my drone and see if I can get LOS to somewhere useful. The development I'm in has a hill in the way and no trees. I don't really want to try to sneak it on my neighbor's roof.
There's a 5-story apt building, not to far, but i'm not sure it has RLOS to the school and it has no service areas on top, all tin roofing.
There's a 3-story hotel that has the right kind of roof layout, but it's way out of RLOS from me.
Could you ask your neighbor?
If you had convenient trees you pick a pine tree that is bare that hasn't been outcompeted by other trees. It doesn't work as well with decidous forests.
Ahh damn, yeah, the only pines we get here are hand-planted... good info though, thank you!