Installing a node on Bays Mountain
A year of trial and error putting a node on the Kingsport Amateur Radio Club tower atop Bays Mountain.
Bays Mountain is one of the best vantage points in the Tri-Cities, and the Kingsport Amateur Radio Club’s tower up there is an obvious home for a mesh node. Getting one working has been harder than expected.
The short version
- July 2024. The first node went up but wasn’t working when installed.
- January 2025. We brought it down and found the battery had died before install. The RAK board didn’t power itself back on when the battery recovered.
- February 2025. After a reset and reinstall it sent telemetry fine, but it wouldn’t receive or relay messages.
- Summer 2025. We tested other hardware. A node at another corner of the mountain worked fine, which pointed to RF noise at the tower site.
- October 2025. We reinstalled with a new RAK node, a new enclosure, and a 900 MHz cavity filter. Next we’ll try mounting it a few feet off the tower.
The full history, with photos, is on the Bays Mountain node page.
What we’ve learned
High sites near other transmitters are noisy. Filtering and physical separation from the other antennas matter as much as height. A board that powers itself back on after a battery recovers is worth a lot when the node is up a tower.