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Stations
Infrastructure that helps when nobody is there
A radio with a persistent store, no phone, no user, and no key to anything it carries. A box that holds sealed messages it cannot read and hands them to whoever comes along next.
Repeaters bridge distance.
Stations bridge time.
A repeater forwards between two nodes in range at the same moment. If you’re the only person on the mountain, a repeater does nothing for you at all. It is a bridge across space, and space was never the hard part.
A station forwards ordinary MeshCore traffic, under the same policy any repeater applies — so it extends everyone’s range, whether or not they run MeshDTN. It still won’t show up in your repeater list: useful infrastructure, invisible as infrastructure, on purpose. And that is only the ordinary half of it. What makes it a different object is the rest: it accepts custody of something now and gives it up later, to someone who wasn’t here.
Two people who are never in the same place on the same day can still exchange messages through it.
The reference station
Seeed Studio SenseCAP Solar Node P1-Pro
Solar panel, four 18650 cells, IPX6 enclosure, onboard GPS. Mount it and forget it.
- Radio
- Wio-SX1262
- Power
- Solar panel and 4×18650 cells
- Weather
- IPX6 enclosure
- Timekeeping
- Onboard GPS disciplines the clock outdoors
- Management
- Bluetooth on demand, from the app
- Firmware
- Over-the-air updates from your phone
Behavior
What a station does
Carries
An append-only store with compaction, surviving power cycles, firmware upgrades and flat batteries. Records outlive the software that wrote them.
Fragments
Holds partial messages and hands over exactly the pieces a passer-by is missing.
Forgets on purpose
A verified kill record tells it to stop carrying a delivered message — checked against a cryptographic commitment, so no passer-by can delete messages they don’t own. Kill records survive a reboot.
Refuses to guess the time
Without a disciplined clock it expires nothing rather than throwing away messages it can’t correctly age. GPS disciplines it outdoors.
Is managed from your phone
Bluetooth on demand — off by default, on when you ask. A station page showing records held, uptime, clock state and radio status, and OTA firmware updates from the app. You’re not carrying a laptop up a ladder in the rain.
Knows nothing about anybody
No user, no contacts, no key to anything it carries, no record of who it met. It has the same Ed25519 node keypair every MeshCore node has, and signs its own advert with it — that is all. A station operator holds ciphertext they cannot read, and the architecture keeps it that way permanently.
Station roles
Configuration, not firmware
Stations negotiate capabilities, so a network can hold nodes built years apart and still find a common subset. A station’s role is something you set, not something you flash.
- Carrier
- Participates in store-carry-forward
- Station
- Persistent unattended storage; also forwards stock MeshCore traffic
Deploy a corridor
Isolated pockets become a continuous message path
Stations placed along a route turn a set of isolated pockets into a continuous message path. Nobody has to be at any of them: each one holds what it is handed and passes it to the next person through, so a message crosses the whole route by traveling in pieces, with different people, at different times.
Range data belongs to the operator
Each station keeps a local-only, never-transmitted measurement log. Airtime, byte counts, signal strength and durations are measurements a station may keep. Message identifiers and peer identities are somebody else’s metadata, and a station never records them against a timestamp.
Station callout
Put one on a pole and walk away.
Solar. GPS. Weatherproof. Managed over Bluetooth from your phone, updating its own firmware over the air, holding messages for people who will never meet each other.