![]() ![]() Suddenly don’t see the kid where expected? Ping the radio for a location update. But on a day-to-day basis, I’m much more interested in giving one of the battery-powered radios with each of my kids, before letting them out the door. If I can talk a few friends into stashing a radio, if tornado really comes and ruins our day, we’ll have a backup communication net to organize getting help where it’s needed. I have several use-cases where Meshtastic just might be the killer app. The system was originally designed for friends going hiking, camping, or even hang gliding together. There are other modules, like sending telemetry data like temperature and humidity across the network, or a rather impressive experimental module that sends low bit-rate audio across the aether. And if your radio knows where it’s at, it can send location data every few minutes to the primary shared channel. Meshtastic works best when sending text messages, either directly to another radio, or to a shared channel. OK, so what can you do with it? Keep in mind that LoRa isn’t winning any throughput contests. But if you can get a couple of radios in elevated locations across your area, you can manage pretty good coverage. By default, each packet is limited to three hops, and the protocol tries to be smart about not flooding the aether with useless echoes. If your radio can talk to your buddy’s radio up on the hill, that device works as a repeater, and rebroadcasts the packet, giving your message a much wider reach. So to make up for the less-than-stellar propagation of the frequency band, the Meshtastic protocol makes every node a potential repeater. And with only a 1 watt output power, we’re not blasting though much earth. The 915 MHz band that Meshtastic targets is still pretty dependent on line-of-sight - no ionosphere skipping here. You may notice that both records required elevation. Yes, that test did involve a weather balloon, but the second-place test was a still-respectable 103 mile (166 km) distance managed peak-to-peak across water. I hear you radio geeks scoffing, “A measly watt?” But people have managed 128 mile (206 km) LoRa contacts on quite a bit less than that full watt. And that’s one of Meshtastic’s features it uses AES encryption to keep conversations private. If you have your Ham license, feel free to turn up the power - but with the caveat that amateurs can’t use encryption. One of the winning features of that band is that no amateur license is required, up to a 1 W broadcast strength. The Meshtastic radio magic comes from LoRa, a wireless protocol running on the sub-1 GHz bands. ![]() Use a USB-C cable to hang that off your phone, and you can connect to nearby metastatic channels, or create your own private channel. For instance, the WisBlock Meshtastic starter kit is a mere $24.99. ![]() It runs on a few different development boards, and some of the hardware is surprisingly affordable. One of the possible solutions was Meshtastic, an encrypted wireless protocol that uses meshing to distribute messages and location data. A follower described a problem where communication could be cut off in the midst of a large protest in her home country, and she needed a way to stay connected in a crowd. I had already been exploring an open source project that might be able to help. If he had needed help, and had no working communications, how long would it have taken for us to go check on him? … Is cell service back?” It is a bit spooky to think about trying to help neighbors and friends after a disaster, in the midst of the communication breakdown that often follows. Even took down my Internet.” Followed by “Whee, got knocked out and now Starlink has too many clouds in the way.” And after ten minutes of silence, we got a bit worried to see “Time to hide under a bed. While it wasn’t too bad, power did go down in a few places around town, and this led to an interesting series of events.Ĭhat messages were coming in like this: “That was a flicker, yeah. Only a couple roofs collapsed, though probably half the houses in town are going to need roof repairs, thanks to the combination of huge hail and high winds. That’s not surprising here in Oklahoma, and thankfully this event was an F0 or possibly even an EF0 - a really weak tornado.
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