When planning a mesh radio network you need to know where to put your nodes. This tool has two modes:

Radio mapping - Drive around with a radio and a GPS tracker, then feed the data in. The tool correlates your signal readings with GPS positions and generates an interactive map showing where your signal is strong, weak, one-way, or absent. Useful for understanding real-world coverage from an existing base station.

Node placement - Given a geographic area and your constraints (mesh link range, number of nodes, existing base stations), the tool uses SRTM terrain elevation data to compute line-of-sight across the region and find optimal positions for new nodes. Each node placement is verified to have a line-of-sight mesh route back to your base. Placements can be optimized for either total land area covered or total population reached, using WorldPop 1 km population rasters that are auto-downloaded on first run.

You can use either mode independently or both together.

Requires Julia 1.10+.

julia -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.add(["EzXML", "JSON3"])'

Each team needs:

• An RNode radio connected via USB running collector/main.py
• A phone recording a GPX track (Open GPX Tracker, OsmAnd, etc.)

See collector/readme.txt for hardware setup. The collector script saves a mesh_data_node_<name>.json when you exit.

Put your .gpx files in data/gpx/ and .json files in data/mesh/.

Edit config.toml with your base station coordinates, team files, and settings. Then:

julia -t auto run.jl

This downloads elevation data, computes line-of-sight, optimizes station placement, and generates output/radio_map.html.

You can also run individual steps:

julia run.jl --map              # just the map
julia run.jl --los              # just line-of-sight
julia -t auto run.jl --optimize 7   # optimize for 7 stations

Everything is in config.toml - base station coords, coverage radius, mesh range, team definitions, etc. The included config has comments explaining each field.