Stones River club upgrades Meshtastic and GMRS on tower 23

A single tower swap on the Stones River Amateur Radio Club’s 23 tower sharpened both its Meshtastic mesh and its GMRS reach, with a new core node and a GMRS antenna now sharing the site. The club said the work was completed in a May 21 update, with Mark McDougal W4DMM supplying the equipment, Mark Morgan WW9Z climbing the tower, and Wendall Curvin KQ4FIT and Tom Delker K1KY handling ground support.

That matters because Meshtastic lives or dies on siting as much as software. The project describes itself as an open-source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network built on affordable, low-power devices, and its documentation says it uses LoRa radios to pass messages without internet or cell service. Meshtastic also treats device roles and propagation as core parts of the system, with repeater-style and router-style configurations built to extend reach and range-test guidance centered on modem settings, antennas, and real-world performance.

By replacing a Meshtastic core node on an elevated site, the club signaled that the network is being treated like working infrastructure, not a tabletop experiment. Tower height can make or break local coverage, and a properly placed node can do things a good handheld or a clever configuration cannot. On a cluttered landscape, a shared tower site can improve reliability, extend range, and make a mesh node useful to more than one corner of a county.

The GMRS side of the upgrade carries its own practical weight. The Federal Communications Commission describes GMRS as a mobile two-way voice service with limited data applications, and FCC rules require an individual license to operate GMRS stations. Adding a GMRS antenna to the same tower ties that service into the same elevated footprint, giving the club a stronger platform for voice communications alongside its mesh work.

For the Stones River Amateur Radio Club, based in Murfreesboro and serving Rutherford County and surrounding counties, the work fits a broader pattern. The club published a separate Meshtastic explainer on November 12, 2025, showing that the May 21 tower job was part of a longer push to understand and use the system. Tower 23 now stands as the clearest sign of that shift: if Meshtastic is going to feel dependable in the real world, the site itself has to carry its weight.