So I was interested in mesh comms years ago. Serval mesh and other wifi meshes were of interest, but never seemed to actually… work.
Then I got a couple of Gotennas. Used them once at a festival and then they went in a box.
Got them out about a year ago and tried to use them, discovered the company who made them decided to stop support for the common plebs who got them kickstarted, and now only do commercial / military apps. Greeeat. Look into HAM radio for the APRS, but hear from a friend that used to do it that in our country it’s a higher level license to do any data, lot of expense and time, and thus there were few people actually doing it, so decide not to go that route. They mention Meshtastic briefly.
Skip forward and see a mention of the T1000-E… yes, I think this is the solution. Buy 4, and then a few days later see mention of the Station G2. Buy one.
They arrive and I get them set up and have a tinker… now it’s time to start telling other people and ask if they can help me test.
I live in a really small rural town of 300 people at 500m on a sortof plateau (small gradients around town) in a mountainous region, couple of hours from a major city. The power fairly regularly goes out, usually from trees dropping power lines in heavy wind, and this is only going to get worse with climate change. Power out means no broadband. If the power is out more than a few hours, no cell connection either (which isn’t great to begin with). So here is a clear use case for local comms in emergencies a few times a year at least.
So I contact two local friends and ask if they would be interested in testing a new radio mesh thing. Unbeknownst to me, BOTH of them actually have experience in HAM / CB radio.
They both are keen to have a play and I give the first a T1000-E a few days back, and with a bit of trial and error, we get a stable connection between our houses that are about 400m apart. This is without even getting antennas on roofs. Then yesterday other friend comes over and I give them a T1000-E and he pops back home - only about 200m to his place. Easy connection, no issues. Other friend is away during the day but I announce on LongFast that we have grown the mesh, but I go to sleep before he gets back.
I wake up this morning to find a smatter of conversation between them after I went to bed, and this is my favourite comment:
“I look at the s/n ratios and think it’s impossible, but it works. Some very clever design and tech.”
😀
So hopefully, we will get more people interested and even potentially a connection to two other towns nearby. Both have significant hills in the way and one is in a twisty windy valley, so we’ll need to get creative or maybe need to set up private mqtt server to relay between key nodes but aware that won’t be useful in emergency situation with no internet/cell data, but we’re learning as we go: I’m happy to have two people on board with more experience than me too.
#meshtastic
I’d like to add as I wait for my t1000e in the mail (ordered today lol), that for things like festivals or parks where it isn’t an emergency, meshtastic seems better imo.
Better than FRS simply because I don’t always want VOX, maybe it’s a music festival and I can’t hear the radio so good, maybe I don’t want to need headphones for “private” comms (encoding speech or encrypting traffic is illegal on FRS, so by private here I mean not overheard by the guy next to me, anyone else with an FRS radio can hear too by default), better than GMRS because no $70 license in addition to the FRS issues, better than 2m/70cm for the same reasons but the license is $15+test, and add in GPS to more easily track the other nodes instead of “I’m over by the porta potties, where are you?” You can just follow the map/arrow! Speaking of not hearing, I’m an old man now, my hearing is already shit from years of punk shows in basements without earpro, and now I use it, so with VOX I have to choose my earpro or the comms (or use quad ops-cores lmao), with meshtastic I don’t have to choose. Meshtastic is also cheaper even if we’re not talking opscore, you can probably get a set of cheap FRS radios from walmart for equivalent/cheaper, but then you have the problems of FRS plus shitty radios and I’m using the baofeng on it illegally, meshtastic wins again.
Imo, in an emergency it’s best to have both, in a non emergency I’m reaching for the meshtastic before the baofeng, except at work where FRS is the standard.
Yup! Meshtastic makes a lot of sense for a whole range of use cases. I am also a festival goer and having text comms can be very useful in those circumstances.