I believe for urban areas, low gain is suggested. I’m in a suburban area, and after testing I found my repeater did better with a 2dbi antenna than a 6dbi.

Little update. Tried out this 2 dbi antenna tonight, and got probably about a 50% improvement in range. About 4500 feet before, to 1.25-1.5 mile depending on direction. So, definitely appreciate the suggestion!

In terms of layout, there were a few decisions. For antennas, it’s because I didn’t want to put too tight of a bend in either cable, preventing a crimp. Not sure if it matters. Likewise, the rak boards are pushed up as far as I can to keep enough room to easily access the USB ports should I need serial access.

Awsome! Yea, I’ve still got a lot to learn about antennas. I’ve been working towards my general HAM license, and antenna design starts to come into play at that point.

I’ve also been trying to incorporate a raspberry pi into another node I’m working on, but it’s a pi zero 2w. I’d like to build a fully off grid, solar powered ADS-B node. The current build is too much for even 3 18650s. Not sure it’ll ever work out. The ultimate goal is a mesh repeater set up with a pi for occasional serial control and updates. We’ll see if I ever get there.

Yes, as mentioned in another comment, I understand the impact. The mesh traffic in my area is extremely light, and I expect cross node interference to be extremely rare. But, it’s something I plan to address in the next version.

That makes sense. My understanding is gain is expressed relative to a perfect omnidirectional antenna. So, higher gain means you’re making trade-offs in the area covered by the antenna. I’ve ordered some 2 dBi antennas to test with before deploying these.

Yea, it’s definitely not ideal for a high traffic repeater. My area’s got pretty minimal traffic, so I don’t expect there’s enough traffic to cause interference right now. When I get to a V3, I’ll probably be upgrading to a wider enclosure to get better spacing. The same company has a 200mm tall box I could mount horizontal, and put the antennas on the long side.

I’d take a look at packer and ansible. Packer can be used to prepare a new base image for your VMs. And ansible can be used to automate the provisioning of a VM once it’s booted.

Slightly educated guess. True organic cork is produced by cutting the bark off specific trees. There are limited climates it grows. I would guess the scale with which we produce bottled drinks would require significantly more trees and labor that we currently have. And thus cork prices would skyrocket.

If you’re considering video transcoding, I’d give Intel a look. Quicksync is pretty well supported across all of the media platforms. I do think Jellyfin is on a much more modern ffmpeg than Plex, and it actually supports AMD. But, I don’t have any experience with that… Only Nvidia and Intel. You really don’t need a powerful CPU either. I’ve got my Plex server on a little i5 NUC, and it can do 4k transcodes no problem.

You really don’t need an AIO with a 5600X. Just grab a reasonably sized tower cooler and call it a day. There’s less to fail, and less risk of water damage if it fails catastrophically. I’ve found thermalright to be exceptionally good for how well priced they are. Not as quiet as Noctua, but damn near the same cooling performance.

Another thing to consider is that a 5600X doesn’t have built in graphics. I think you’d need to jump up to AM5/7600X for that.