Pine Ridge is located on a tower atop Penn View Mountain. Despite it’s incredible profile, it somewhat struggles to make it a significant distance due to the unique geography of this area. It even lights up Laurel Ridge beautifully, but cannot make it into Johnstown without another node there to help it along the way. It does, however bring the mesh into Indiana and Blairsville quite well! Hopefully one day we can get another node further east to make the hop.
Pine Ridge is special in that it’s installed in a very challenging RF environment. The trouble with being atop a mountain is often that you’re not alone in the real-estate category. Other people want a slice of that pie too. So we have Verizon, AT&T, and others to fight for spectrum. They’re not in our little slice of sectrum at 907 Mhz exactly, but they do occupy the band immediately adjacent to us around 890 Mhz. This is close enough that with enough transmit power, our comparatively weak signals can be missed by our receiver. It’s like trying to have a whisper conversation at a rock concert. To alleviate this problem Pine Ridge has a band-pass filter installed to effectively reject any signal outside the 915Mhz unlicensed band Meshtastic uses in the United States.
As you can clearly see, we’re not alone at this tower site!