Two silent drops in the RX-log mapper, and between them a device sitting
beside this one could trace all day and never appear in the feed.
A frame that crossed no relays was discarded as having "no topology
content". It has the most there is: nothing stood between us, so we heard
the transmitter itself. Only an advert survived, and only because it
carries an origin key — every trace, message, request and ack from an
adjacent node went into the bin. Now a frame is kept unless the library
could not even give it a payload class, and the empty path says what it
means: zero hops crossed.
The other is a trace reading its own header wrong. Every class keeps
relay hashes in the path field; a trace keeps one signed SNR byte per hop
it has traversed. Read as hashes those bytes resolved to whichever nodes
shared their leading digits and entered the topology graph as links that
were never observed. The population says so plainly: across 1604 stored
traces, all 2221 path entries land inside the LoRa SNR band when read as
signed bytes, spanning -10.5 to +15.0 dB, where hashes would put five in
six outside it. So a trace now yields no hops, and its readings — which
are worth having — ride alongside as trace_snrs.
The 1604 rows already stored keep their bad paths; a one-shot cleanup
follows separately.