This node occupies leased space on a commercial structure located near Calvary Cemetery. The structure it is mounted to has a total height of approximately 300ft, but this one is mounted only about 60ft up. The installation height of 60ft was chosen for convenience and performance moderation reasons. At this height, the node can clearly see APOLLO and reach into some southern parts of downtown Pittsburgh. This node is designed to cover Squirrel hill, Dormont, Braddock, and Homestead areas as well. At a height of only 60ft AGL, it seems to do well with these zones. Additionally, the site is shared with multiple cellular carriers which transmit very near the ISM (900mhz) band. Their output ERP (effective radiated power) could easily wipe out Calvary’s ability to decode weak LoRa signals. Keeping the node low on the tower helps to ensure the cellular RF is projected mostly above it instead of at it.
To increase the height of this node, it is likely we will need to employ a similar solution as we did with Pine Ridge with a band-pass filter to prevent the cellular RF from overloading our tiny little radio.
This node, being in such a prominent location is set to “Router_Late”. It is not a router because there are other much better placed nodes in the area such as APOLLO which is the preferred route for packets exiting Pittsburgh at the time of writing. Calvary is a supplemental node to the network and shouldn’t be used as a primary Router because it cannot see very far by comparison.