That's radio physics, so the answer has tiers. The 915 MHz LoRa radios are engineered for miles, but antenna height and terrain set your real range, not the spec sheet. At trail-camera height in dense timber, plan on hops of a few hundred yards. Give a relay some elevation and a cleaner shot and a hop stretches to a mile or more. A gateway antenna up on a mast with line of sight can span several.

The mesh exists so you never need one heroic link: short, reliable hops, relayed. We'll keep publishing measured results from our own deployments (mast, ridgeline, worst-case dense canopy), but the radio isn't the gamble. Your topography is the variable.

What we've measured so far, both ends of every link, is on the numbers page — including a 544 m delivery through summer timber and the 22 dB obstruction shadow that's the reason we plan with a much smaller figure than that.

A camera and a gateway. The gateway sits wherever the property already has internet (cabin WiFi, DSL, Starlink), and a camera in range talks to it directly. Relays come in only when distance or terrain demands them; a small parcel may never need one.

You lose nothing. Every camera keeps its full-resolution originals on its own SD card, and the mesh stores and forwards: an outage delays a photo, it never loses one. When the connection returns, the backlog drains on its own.

The server is open source (AGPL, free to self-host forever) and the hosted cloud is optional. The mesh itself never touches the internet — it's your own radio network — so if you run the server on the same network as the gateway (a Raspberry Pi at the cabin is plenty), the whole system works with no internet connection at all: camera to mesh to gateway to your server, browsable from anything on that network.

Internet only enters the picture when you want your photos from somewhere else — the hosted cloud, or however you already reach your own machines from away.

Cameras spend almost their entire lives asleep drawing microamps, waking only for motion and scheduled check-ins. That's the whole power design, and it's why there's no monthly-charging ritual. A small solar panel keeps the cell topped up.

You buy the cell yourself: a LiFePO4 IFR26650, which drops into the bay on the board. We don't sell cells, and the build guide names the vendors we buy ours from. Use one of them. The big marketplaces are a counterfeit minefield, and a fake cell is the one part in this build that can hurt you.

Yes, when you build it that way, and the board is designed for it. An 850 nm infrared illuminator wakes with the camera and lights the scene — the same low-glow IR band most trail cameras use. Production boards (hardware v1.1) carry the illuminator's power and switching on the board, so the IR array plugs into a 2-pin socket and the firmware fires it. You supply the array and a camera module without an IR filter; we stock a tested night camera module on the shop page. Most wildlife moves at dawn, dusk, and dark; a camera that sleeps through that would be pointless.

No. The camera always captures full resolution and keeps it. What crosses the mesh first is a small preview, so you know what walked by in seconds; tap Request HD (or pull the camera's untouched original) and the full file follows. The radio decides how fast a photo arrives, never how good it is.

No. MeshCam uses the 915 MHz ISM band, the same unlicensed spectrum trail cameras, garage-door openers, and smart-home gear already use in North America. The LoRa radio module carries its own FCC ID, and the board is completing FCC equipment authorization before it ships. Every board ships with its antenna and pigtail in the box, because the rules say a radio is sold as a complete system or it is not sold at all.