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Meshtastic is nice. I have one node already, debating myself if that’s enough or if I should get/build a solar node.

I was very fortunate that there’s an active community in my city. I can reach nodes 50km away without a big antenna.

Currently working on a sideproject using meshtastic and conventional LoraWAN:

We have dozens of smaller streams here that are somewhat flash flooding prone, often with extremely locally limited precipitation. (The last time I took damage the cell was 500m wide and the damage area was only 1.2km long. We received almost 80l/m² in one hour) This makes monitoring and warning extremely difficult and the official water level probes by the government are too far downstream and only show larger issues - for the people living on the smaller ones the damage is done - for some it might also be too late to warn them off upcoming backwater as the communication options are often difficult for them.

The idea is to use no-contact water level probes deployed to strategically useful locations and maintained by locals to monitor the level and flow of the water, transmit via conventional LoraWAN and meshtastic and inform both the local communities and official emergency response channels of the levels.

Currently still in an early stage but we are seeing more interest in that and it might end up as an official research project by a local university. (If anyone has any recommendations for cheap reliable sensors let me know…this is the current main issue - the whole node needs to be under 250€ in the end)

Have a node up in the attic which is bridged to my wifi and into my Matrix server. Of course, in the event of a catastrophe the usage will be direct bluetooth connection from a phone instead.

The range is impressive, my node connects to others several tens of kilometers away.

Is there som rough map of where this stuff exist?

This will be fantastic during the apocalypse and we lose Internet.
Too bad I’ll have lost the Internet so I won’t be able to learn how to get the equipment and set it up, until it’s too late

You saw that post of the guy on the bus as well then?

What do you plan to do with it?

I’ve looked into Meshtastic, I have a pair of nodes. I am solidly not impressed.

I live in a wooded area, I can shout farther than the range of these nodes. It’s hilariously pathetic. Yes I know people who live on mountaintops can hear the gods themselves on this thing but in the forest the RF spectrum ends at 300MHz. The U in UHF stands for USELESS. So unless you’re in the room with someone else who has a node, the experience of using it is turning on MQTT and only making contacts that way. Which means you’ve bought a badly made low power radio to connect your phone to itself.

The software is pretty bad, too. It’s got a lot of the standard FOSS defects, there’s a LOT of features that are about 1/3 of the way implemented and the feature set is different from platform to platform. On the Android app, you can “reply” to someone else’s message, almost like conversation threading. On the web UI, that feature isn’t supported so the message just comes through with less context. There’s emoji reactions! On the mobile app, you can see someone has reacted with an emoji to your message. There’s no way to see who, because if you tap on the emoji you’ll respond with the same emoji, so the identity of your contact will just be a mystery forever. On the web UI, reactions aren’t a thing, and it looks like someone posts a message with a single emoji in it. So you can tell who posted it, but without the context as to why.

There’s a range test function that sets a node to kind of an automatic beacon, so you can take another for a walk or drive and see just how truly pathetic the range is, and your mobile node will store its GPS coordinates…forever. They made it able to store it as a file but did not provide the ability to erase it.

There’s like five ways of interfacing with the microcontroller’s GPIO or serial bus to attach external hardware, each more convoluted and limiting than the last. Oh, and if you want to do some like remote telemetry or control across the mesh, I hope you like spamming everybody, because even though it has the concept of private channels, you’re not allowed to use any of them. Almost all automated messaging is forced into the Primary channel.

The only thing I can see that recommends Meshtastic over Meshcore or Reticulum is it’s relatively easy to get two nodes talking to each other on Meshtastic, you’ve just got to make sure like 40 settings match on two devices.

We see “-tastic” used as a suffix so often that it seems genuinely odd to see it explicitly explained.

Fun if you are travelling and go to a new town/city with an active user base.

That reminds me, I want to get some walkie talkies for my kids. There may be loRa walkie talkies maybe?

Meshtastic is cool, I haven’t gotten into it. It’s all license free. I say that because some other radio based hobbies need a license (GMRS and ham).

Folks looking into it, many of the devices use Bluetooth to communicate with a phone or computer so you don’t need to type messages directly on the device, but the technology is still off grid. There are totally self contained devices you can type on directly. I just wanted to mention that because seeing “off grid” then seeing them pairing with phones can be confusing. It’s truly only to enter messages and keep devices a little cheaper and easier to use.

@bytesonbike no nodes anywhere near me, and i don’t want to be the first.