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I’ve come to the realization that mesh nodes are little more than a gateway drug into the world of ham radio. And for that I’m grateful.
It’s not as good, and does everything worse than radio. The only real world use I have found is for when cellphone networks get overwhelmed at things like music festivals and large sports games. No one else’s texts go through, but I can toss by buds a node to put in their back pocket and we can stay in touch.
our local mature club is building our local mesh network out now as an introduction to the ham world. And it’s working. It’s getting the younger kids and adults through the door. And from there, it’s an easy thing to get them interested in more useful and fun forms of communication.
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Oh it’s a hundred percent just the novelty communication technology that is in vogue right now. I don’t really know if it’s a true zeitgeist technology or if someone with a lot of product to sell who is playing with the social media algorithm. But I guess I don’t really care much.
The trick is to find a way to seize on that opportunity. Now that our mesh network is structurally sound and sufficient, I’m working on using a raspberry pi to automate our ham club meeting dates, testing dates, and field days, and then blast those messages once a week or so over the mesh network. That way, an impulse buy turns into the discovery of a fuctional network and afterwards, a random person can discover a whole local community of people with all sorts of new things to learn.
You can lead a horse to water. But you can’t make him drink.
first you need a trough. That’s the mesh network. After, the horse needs to be thirsty. That’s the curiosity people have. information, the when and how and where, you can automate and passively tell them about. that’s the water.
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There was a massive power outage in Portugal not too long ago and people used Meshtastic to communicate between cities to see who had power.
It does work, but it’s not a Final Solution
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Both can coexist, more options is better when talking about decentralised systems
I like the idea of a ham radio, but too voice shy to actually talk lol, so I don’t bother with it.
Now let me introduce you to APRS 😁
It’s pretty much the HAM equivalent of Meshtastic
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FT8 is fun and doesn’t require talking. CW too but you need to learn Morse code.
I bring FRS radios (normal ol’ walkie talkies) to the local Renaissance festival which has awful to no cell reception. It works great.
But yeah the barrier to even getting a technician license is too high. You get people that get excited and wanna do stuff and then they’re told they can’t. So things like meshtastic where they actually can do radio related things without a license are great.
I’ve been fooling around with Meshtastic for a couple years and haven’t come up with a real world use for it yet, other than scenarios like you mentioned.
What would be really cool is if cell phone makers could incorporate a mesh into their phones as a local public channel when the tower goes out. It would probably just be used by drug dealers or something, but it’s the only cool and functional idea I can come up with.
If they can’t charge an admittance fee or a per message fee, they won’t implement it. It goes against their business model.
But we can dream.
Controlling home automation remotely without any internet access.
Tracking dogs, people or vehicles - again with no internet.
I don’t see how you could get enough reliability to do either from any distance.
It all depends on the environment and the amount of nodes. I’m not exactly controlling Fort Knox here so 100% reliability isn’t a big point
It’s still cool to be at the store 2-3km away and get a notification that the fridge door is open, via a completely independent network 😀
I get the exact same notification via the internet, but it’s not as cool
FYI if you’re ham licensed, you can boost the output power of your mesh radio. There’s a setting in most firmwares.
If I recall correctly, you can, but it removes your node from the public networks everyone else is using because hams cannot use encryption for coms as part of the rules for ham operation, as the non ham network is encrypted by default. You would have to build a secondary network independent of the public node list.
Correct me if I’m wrong. But that was my understanding of the difference.
You’re probably right. I noticed the feature, but haven’t personally tried it.
Here meshtastic has become part of the emergency information network initiative. If there is a coms blackout, intercity/town civillian communications are to be handled by amateur radio enthusiast with licence and communications whitin the city/town will be handled by licence free systems. Meshtastic has been spreading well among the general public, so it has become most viable system to use at lowest level in the chain.
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The HAM license isn’t a trivial checkbox test, at least not over here
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Finland. The questions for the basic test require you to actually know your shit, they’re specifically worded so that you can’t wing it
I failed it, that’s how I know. By a few points but still 😀
You get shitloads more people to buy a cheap gadget that’s easy carry with you.
If you start talking about ham radios and licences, most people loose interest before you finish the sentence.
Have you thought about not trying to drag meshtastic down to try and prop ham up?
I get it, you spent a bunch of time studying for your ham and you don’t want it to feel like a waste, but lets be perfectly frank here- most people aren’t going to get a HAM license. It IS, however, VERY accessible for someone to buy a cheap gadget on sale to try out.
I never understand why ham radio people always try to sabotage every other communication method, but you guys do it every time.
Let other people communicate how they want.
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I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.
For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?
AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.
So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.
So much of our infrastructure uses the internet now that if it goes down I wouldn’t be shocked if electric grids, healthcare, shopping, public transport, etc also shit the bed.
Add some batteries to the meshtatic nodes. and even if all electricity and networks go down, you and your friends can still organize and plan.
I can only speak for the US, but our electric grids and production are supposed to be air gapped for critical infrastructure. Healthcare? I doubt it based on the continuous leaks there - and medical supply chains are tightly integrated with internet/cloud… Shopping still has a fairly sizeable local accessibility for staple items, certainly food distro where the internet wouldn’t matter for at least a short while, but it’s also tightly integrated for Supply Chain Management, much like Health care - so there could be a run on it.
I’m not sure on public transport, but most are goverment led, so probably air gapped.
There’s also a shitton of dark fiber laying about. Internet infrastructure COULD be brought back up depending on the damage that triggered outages in the first place.
Literally all the ordering for stores uses the internet now; we’d be absolutely fucked for a good while if the internet actually went down in the USA.
I’m just here to cheer on a Jitsi link in the wild.
Go Jitsi!
For others who (like me) never heard of this before:
Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.
Unfortunately I had to remove Jitsi after they started requiring a “moderator” to start meetings.
This tech would be great if we had high power nodes all across the globe. But we do not. Maybe a cool idea could be encrypted data over FM radio. The radio stations already exist and are a dying business. Nonprofits could buy up radio stations and rebroadcast data broadly and only those with the encryption keys could decrypt. Cut the ISP out entirely. Like the difference between a local call and a long distance call.
Meshtastic communication would prioritize local hops where they are available and then where there are spans of area without nodes, they could hop across radio broadcasts.
Primary issue would be speed. Next to no bandwidth on a signal like that. Kbps not Mbps. Perhaps an incentive for much better compression as well.
For anyone reading this currently, it appears that regulation bans any form of encryption over HAM radio broadcasts. So I guess that’s one reason this won’t work.
How would they find out ?
A high powered antenna that transmits a lot of “static” would be a dead giveaway.
Regulations can be changed?
It’s also slow AF. It’s potentially faster to have someone read you text than get it by packet over radio.
I don’t think you’re going to be downloading a linux distro over this system. It’s probably just going to be text and the most basic data,
That’s what the internet was, at first
Yep, but what we had access to was far, far different than what we see today. I wouldn’t have a problem with basic features like FTP, telnet, newsgroups or whatever, but the content will be limited. Gonna be back to dialup speeds.
That’s what the last bit of my comment was about. Compression would need significant improvement before it were usable for most things people use the internet for.
I’m not sure compression would solve the issue I mentioned - this would be probably more akin to using Napster to DL a song in 2001 via dialup, or trying to get an image off a newsgroup at best. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be useful, just very limited. Like I said, you’re not getting a full distro this way.
Packet over radio does exist, and it’s sloooooooooooooow and there’s tons of loss. Imagine the first modems over phone lines, then slow it down more.
Legally, in the US, it can’t be encrypted, either. A single geostationary satellite would be faster, especially if latency wasn’t an issue.
Sounds like a better idea to implement as a reticulum medium.
I love Meshtastic. Had a nice convo with a stranger last night while I was LoRa wardriving to test out the range of my new rooftop antenna on my house.
The internet will get back up if it goes down. It is very decentralized. Sea cables and DNS is where most of the centralization occurs, and DNS going down is not at all the end of the internet. How man sea cables have to be broken at once for the internet to break, I’m not entirely sure.
Meshtastic is a cool thing and it is very useful, internet up or down.
That won’t help for situations where a government shuts down access to the internet.
How resistant would this be to jamming? Iran managed to black out Starlink.
And how trackable is it? Not sure how many people would be prepared to run one of these boxes if the Revolutionary Guard are going to come knocking.
It’s pretty easy to jam as it’s just radio waves. Increase the noise on the channel and the chirps of your msg don’t get heard. That said there are some options to vary the channel as a group, and jamming a broad and robust mesh completely vs an area of nodes is a bit harder.
Trackable as in traceable? You mean finding your node location? By default not overly difficult but again, can be set up to make it hard to find you.
Riots fix that, not meshtastic
Riots are better coordinated when people can communicate wirelessly
A government can shut down a riot of 10,000
It struggles with 10 1,000 person riots.
No doubt, but meshtastic really is a temporary solution, but a very good solution since it’s only necessary for a temporary amount of time. I’m just saying there aren’t really many cases outside of a catastrophic mass human extinction event that would disable the internet infrastructure beyond maybe a few years if that. Won’t be a library of alexandria moment from a connectivity side, but which servers are still up is the real question
I think at that point it’s more of a revolution than a riot, but I agree
If they shut the Internet and there is a decent meshtastic network they will jam that as well.
This is a non answer. yes, hypothetically they can, but the whole point of finding alternative channels is to make it difficult for them to do so, to the point that they might not even try.
That pessimism of “they can jam it anyways” is like saying do not wear a helmet while riding a bike, if you are meant to die that day, you will die regardless of head protection.
Plus, it will take resources for them to jam things, and the more resources they need to do that shit the faster it will deplete them and the less they can do, it is so obvious I do not know how to write it without sounding demeaning.
Maybe so, but incompetence is persistent within fascist organizations, and it adds an extra problem for them to deal with, which has value for that fact alone.
It adds a lot of extra risk since each node is a constant radio beacon that is easily trackable.
Compared with handheld radio that broadcast and disappear.
Friend: do not underestimate how much greed the cel companies are capable of. Many have been working on their own satellite setups in preparation and blasting it in everyone’s face lately.
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I’ve not been recycling my tin cans and I have a whole shitload of string. Happy to share.
I’ll take 3 bags full. One for the master (coordinator) and one for the slave (endpoints), and one for the little girl who lives down the lane (Fitgirl Repacks)
My remembering of that line is “and one for the dame”, and I grew up in the deep south…strange
I ad-libbed to make my horrible analogy work. I am beyond regret
Nah. It was good.
Queue IT Crowd episode…
I should download classic wow servers game and addons for long term storage in case of WW3 🤔 and wikipedia too
wow before wiki… priorities.
Culture is important ! Science too I guess hut we have libraries
Huh? Can anyone explain what all these words mean? Mesh? Ham radio? How does this work is it like toy walkie talkie?
They’re a mesh walkie-talkie, but you don’t need to walkie or talkie 😁
Meshnet means that if A can see B and B can see C, then A can message C, it’s routed through B automatically.
Also it’s text only, not enough bandwidth for speech
Isn’t this just like the internet though?
That’s the point, but it doesn’t require an ISP
Internet routing is a bit more complex, but basically yes.
So it’s like a pager?
When I think of pagers I think of receiving only, not sending. Meshtastic devices can typically do both.
Kind of. But it is my understanding that pagers work with centralised transmitters/stations. I am no expert though, so maybe there is mesh-like pager protocols.
This is decentralised, a mesh. Routing is done through the terminals themselves, rather than through a centralised transmitter.
I think Ham radio means hobby and amateur radio, I.e. not professional. Radio is a type of radiation at very long wavelength. From the wiki:
long waves can diffractaround obstacles like mountains and follow the contour of the Earth (ground waves), shorter waves can reflect off the ionosphere and return to Earth beyond the horizon (skywaves), while much shorter wavelengths bend or diffract very little and travel on a line of sight, so their propagation distances are limited to the visual horizon.
Others have explained mesh pretty well.
Is there a map that shows where are using them? It looks like a fun idea, but I don’t want to get something and no one is using it in my region. (Outback Australia)
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You’d be surprised.
In NSW Australia there are hardly any two near each other. What is the point of all these people even buying one if you don’t team up with at least one neighbour?
Be the change 😎
It is delusional to think the chances are good of a neighbor just looking up the map and joining in. Geeks need to talk to people in real life, especially in their neighborhood. Team up with at least one other person. Use word of mouth. That is effective change.
Unfortunately I live in a remote area with non-tech people who are not conservative enough to be preppers. I will still run it past them though.
I’d talk to you if you were on the map 👍
A grumpy curmudgeon like me? You must be crazy!
Groucho Marx - “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”
Set up your own emergency grid. I’ve got a couple solar powered nodes around so I can contact my wife even from the villages that aren’t in mobile coverage.
Check out !meshtastic@mander.xyz
I’m really hoping this takes off.
Same, decentralized mesh networks would be the equivalent of a “federated internet”. No one person owning the infrastructure.
If this were to become mainstream the mesh would become the “Internet”, with enough nodes, pcs and servers.
And in the meantime where one mesh does not “connect” to another, traffic could be routed through the “old internet” by one or more exit nodes connected to the “old internet”.
