Start here
LoRa / Meshtastic
License-free radio at 915 MHz, a few miles in the open with tiny power. Meshtastic firmware can already send sensor telemetry, and nodes relay for each other.
- Range
- 1β10+ mi, line of sight
- Cost
- Cheap
- License
- None
Brooks Groves Β· Work Β· Concept Β· Pierce County, WA
A homemade sensor station that reports home by radio.
secchi reads UNR's lake sensors and ALPINE-WATCH reads satellites. OUTPOST would be the first one that's mine end to end: a small box out in the world measuring water and weather, sending its readings home over the air, and landing on this site like the other dashboards. It starts on the kitchen table and works its way out, maybe down Chambers Creek to the Sound, maybe up to an alpine lake.
The candidate site
Chambers Creek drains Lake Steilacoom, right here in Lakewood, and runs through a wooded canyon to Chambers Bay and Puget Sound. The USGS has gauged it below Leach Creek since the late 1930s, so a homemade station near the gauge could be checked against a professional one. Here's that gauge, live.
A schematic, not to scale.
USGS 12091500 Β· Chambers Creek below Leach Creek near Steilacoom Β· 104 sq mi
Loading the last seven daysβ¦
The plan
One node, one temperature probe in a glass of water, talking LoRa to a Raspberry Pi in the house. The Pi commits a reading to a GitHub repo every 15 minutes, and a bare dashboard draws it. Proves the whole chain before anything gets wet.
Weeks Β· no permits Β· no license needed
See the shopping list βSame node in a weatherproof box on a fence post with a small solar panel. Run it through a Northwest winter, which is the real test of the power budget below, and learn how often it can sleep.
A season Β· the battery's hardest months
Water temperature and level near the USGS gauge, with permission from whoever owns the bank. Sitting beside a federal gauge means every reading can be checked against a calibrated one, which is how a homemade station earns trust. The link home may be LoRa through a relay, or APRS once licensed.
Needs landowner permission Β· ham license helps
A summer-season station at a lake ALPINE-WATCH already watches from orbit, giving satellite water temperature its first ground truth. Too far for LoRa, so it either sends by satellite or logs to a card and reports when someone hikes in.
Forest Service permit Β· satellite or store-and-forward
What to buy
Everything for each phase, cheapest-first, with what each part is for. Buy one phase at a time: phase 0 is the only one you need to start, and nothing here needs a license. Tick things off as they arrive.
Prices are rough, in US dollars, as of October 31, 2026. The Heltec, SenseCAP and RockBLOCK prices were checked that day; the rest are typical ranges. Totals leave out the items marked "if needed," "or this" and "later." Ticks are saved in this browser only.
What it could measure
| Measures | Typical part | Why it matters | Cost | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Water temperature | DS18B20 waterproof probe | Salmon live and die by it; the easiest place to start | $ | Easy |
| Air temp, humidity, pressure | BME280 | Weather at the site, and it watches the inside of the box | $ | Easy |
| Water level | Ultrasonic from a bridge, or a submersible pressure sensor | Floods and low flow; pairs with the USGS gauge | $$ | Medium |
| Conductivity | Lab-grade EC probe kit | Road salt and stormwater pulses after rain | $$$ | Medium |
| Turbidity | Optical turbidity sensor | Muddy water after storms; the creek's version of a Secchi disk | $$ | Fiddly |
| Dissolved oxygen | Optical or galvanic DO probe | What fish actually breathe; needs regular calibration | $$$ | Fiddly |
| Rain | Tipping-bucket gauge | Ties creek rises to the storms that caused them | $$ | Easy |
$ is a few dollars to about $20, $$ roughly $20β100, $$$ more than $100. Prices move, so treat these as rough tiers.
Getting the data home
Start here
License-free radio at 915 MHz, a few miles in the open with tiny power. Meshtastic firmware can already send sensor telemetry, and nodes relay for each other.
Where the ham license pays off
Weather and sensor packets on 144.390 MHz, picked up by the volunteer digipeater and internet gateway network and shown on aprs.fi. Rules apply: your call sign in every packet and nothing encrypted.
If there's a signal
A low-power cellular modem sends straight to the internet with no gateway. Simple, but it needs coverage and a monthly data plan.
Alpine lakes
Short Iridium messages work from anywhere with sky. Each message costs money, so it sends a daily summary rather than every reading.
Will it last the winter?
The hard part of a remote station is keeping it alive through December in the Northwest. Play with the numbers. The defaults are a sleeping ESP32 with LoRa, four readings an hour, two 18650 cells and a small panel on a gray winter day.
Assumes a 3.7 V battery and about 70% of the panel's rating reaching it after the charger and the angle. December in western Washington can mean barely an hour of full-sun equivalent a day.
To think about
"How warm does the creek get in August?" or "how fast does it rise after a storm?" leads to different sensors, intervals and sites. The best stations start with one question.
Much of lower Chambers Creek is Pierce County land, and the banks have owners. Ask before anything goes in the water, and make the box look like it belongs to someone who asked.
Creeks rise and boxes walk off. Mount above the high-water line, anchor the probe in a perforated pipe, and put a friendly label with a contact on it.
Same pattern as secchi and ALPINE-WATCH: data in a repo, a GitHub Pages dashboard, maybe a nudge to the weather bots when the creek does something interesting.
Gauge data live from the USGS; creek course from Wikipedia. A concept page: nothing is built or deployed yet. See also On the Air, secchi and ALPINE-WATCH.