An observer derives channel utilisation from the change in transmitted plus
received airtime between two status messages, so a node that publishes only
tx_air_secs cannot be metered: LetsMesh reports no utilisation for an openHop
bridge, and a consumer that defaults the missing key to zero sees TX-only
occupancy, which badly understates a repeater that hears far more than it
repeats.
utilization_percent, already published, is not that figure and cannot stand in
for it. It is this node's spend against its own duty-cycle budget over a
60-second window, so at the default 3600 ms/min it reads 100% at 6% of wall
clock -- a "how close am I to my TX cap" gauge, not channel occupancy.
AirtimeBudgets already tracks received airtime per channel and node_stats()
sums it, so this is a reporting gap rather than a missing measurement. Both
counters go out as whole seconds, matching the firmware's uint32 fields and the
two paths that already report them that way -- the MeshCore wire response in
handler_helpers/protocol_request.py and companion stats in main.py.
Worth knowing when reading the figure: RX airtime is estimated per packet from
the modulation that carried it, over packets that decoded. CRC failures,
preamble-only detections and traffic on other channels are not counted, so it
is a floor on receiver busy time rather than a measurement of it. Firmware's
counter has the same character, so the two remain comparable.
agessaman
11d6391d41