Hi Felix
Taking a step back here, and am seeking advice from the better informed, lets assume I have a range of 20-30Km's I need to cover, comprising of hilly and flat terrain, I can only use ISM frequencies (433/868/915), and wish to track a number of movable assets within this range, the asset count may exceed 300 and all need to be on the same network, (i.e.) when in range of a basestation it will communicate with that basestation with the strongest RSSI and be recognised at any basestation in the network. The node communication will be occasional only (i.e. 1 comms per node per hour, yep will need an RTC).
What network type and radio setup based on what I have mentioned above can one use to track the devices, I have seen that the device(radio) ID is a byte, that leaves me 255 possible nodes in a single network, is this defined by the radio(rfm69) or the software as I have not found the answer in the radio docs yet.
Unless of course the node ID's can all be the same bar the base stations and have the first 2 bytes of the data hold a custom ID, but this means we cant reprogram over the air via a push which may be neccessary from time to time.
That I think is about the only thoughts and questions I have at this stage, any advice in this regard will be highly appreciated.
Many thanks
Edit:
I have found the ID is a byte on the radio, thus with this restriction one might consider all the permanent ID's to be that of the base stations(BS) only, then when a node broadcasts, it will handshake with all audible base stations, the BS with the strongest RSSI becomes the controlling BS and issues a temp ID to the requesting node. If the BS has issued all ID, perhaps send a wait to other requesting nodes, the node can then fall over to the next strongest rssi BS or wait as requested. The node can release the ID and/or the ID can expire at the BS after n-millis ... just thinking...!