LoRa mesh in San Francisco

It will be recalled (see blog article) that I had deployed a temporary Meshcore repeater in Sonoma County, successfully linking to a robust Meshcore network extending across much of northern California.  Today is the day that I retrieved my temporary repeater from its hilltop, and I migrated from Sonoma County to San Francisco.

Two days from now I will be on the dais, co-presenting a training class on the Patent Cooperation Treaty with a very nice person from the World Intellectual Property Organization.  This will be at the spring meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association in San Francisco.  Upon my arrival at the event hotel (the Fairmont on Mason Street) I fired up a Meshtastic node and a Meshcore node.  What devices did I see? 

This is, of course, a densely packed downtown area, with lots of tall buildings and urban canyons.  The event hotel was built in 1907 and the walls of the hotel are very thick and very solid.  My guest room window opens onto a courtyard, meaning that I do not see the sky except by looking straight up.  If you had to pick a place where a 915-MHz signal at 22 dBm might have trouble propagating, this is the place.

On my Meshtastic device, I picked up no other nodes.

On my Meshcore device, you can see a map of some of the nodes that I picked up.  I picked up advertisements from over two hundred repeaters, extending as far south as San Luis Obispo and as far east as Merced.