Skip to main content

Greg

Also known as TBRG — greg_ca on Discord

Hello, I'm Greg

I'm located in Ashton, Ontario, just west of Ottawa, and have been involved with the Ottawa mesh community since around June 2024.

My background is in IT and electronics, and I operate The Board Repair Guy — hence the TBRG nickname.

My work primarily involves electronics and board-level repair, including phones, tablets, computers, appliance and industrial control boards, and automotive electronic modules. I also do microsoldering, diagnostics and automotive module programming.

Radio hardware, embedded electronics and mesh networking fit pretty naturally into the collection of things I like experimenting with.

How did I discover MeshCore?

I originally got involved after finding the Ottawa Meshtastic community in the summer of 2024 and spent the following 9–12 months experimenting with Meshtastic.

Meshtastic was a great introduction to LoRa mesh networking, but over time we found that it didn't perform particularly well for what we were trying to build in the Ottawa area.

Once we discovered MeshCore, things changed very quickly. Its architecture and performance were much better suited to what we wanted from a local mesh, and since then it has pretty much been full steam ahead.

I've been experimenting with nodes, antennas, repeater locations and infrastructure ever since.

Repeaters

My most prominent repeater is Ashton_GrainBin, located in Ashton, Ontario.

The repeater antenna is installed approximately 134 ft (41 m) above ground on my brother's grain elevator, providing an excellent site for coverage through the western Ottawa and eastern Lanark County area.

Ashton_GrainBin is listed under the Beckwith, ON repeater area.

Additional repeaters and infrastructure projects will be linked here as they are added.

My MeshCore nodes

Most of my MeshCore node names begin with TBRG_, so if you see names such as:

  • TBRG_Wio

  • TBRG_1W

  • TBRG_...

...there's a pretty good chance it's one of mine.

Contact

On the mesh, look for one of the TBRG_ nodes.

I'm usually happy to talk about MeshCore, electronics, repeaters, antennas, hardware troubleshooting, or anything involving taking electronic things apart and figuring out how they work.

Discord: greg_ca

Ottawa Mesh Discord: Join the Ottawa Discord server

Back to top