I've found Meshtastic is simply not ready to be set up in an environment without internet, as I discovered when I brought some of the boards I bought with me on vacation to a rural area with more space to test them, but very limited internet.
The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.
- To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the toolchains and flasher programs you need.
- The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer.
- The docs are hosted at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out, but this is seemingly not a primary concern.
I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!
wao0uuno 5 hours ago [-]
I tested meshtastic in a major european city with pretty much 100% mesh coverage and its real life performance was quite underwhelming. Often I would receive messages that I could not reply to because of differences in antenna gain and crappy mesh performance. Public chat was either completely dead or flooded with test messages. Everything was super slow because the mesh can’t actually scale that well and craps out with more than a 100 nodes. Even medium fast channel would clog up fast. I would never depend on meshtastic during an emergency because it barely works even when nobody is using it.
I think a public wifi mesh would be more worthwhile. Older used wifi routers are pretty much free and in unlimited supply. They use very little power. Everyone already has a compatible client device on their pocket. Sure the mesh would fail during a total blackout but at least it would be useful for something when the power is up.
TeamMCS 3 hours ago [-]
I agree with this assessment. I've been running two nodes for about a year, maybe longer, and in that time, I've only had perhaps two contacts.
Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868 MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down the road. While I understand that height is key (and my antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates very rapidly.
So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the practical execution falls short. I think established methods like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior, especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio incredibly affordable (around €20)
I can't say I have. Let me look into it. Thanks for the share
adrianN 4 hours ago [-]
Wifi routers use quite a lot of power for the area that they can cover. Ten watts or so for a hundred square meters is a lot of you want to cover a whole city.
wao0uuno 3 hours ago [-]
Almost everyone has one of these running 24/7 already. Second one with an external antenna wouldn’t make much difference.
Aachen 54 minutes ago [-]
Everyone currently has electricity on demand
GardenLetter27 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be really useful (using phones).
Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.
moffkalast 4 hours ago [-]
It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings with weird chins.
pyrale 2 hours ago [-]
> It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity
The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.
The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.
edent 3 hours ago [-]
Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.
moffkalast 3 hours ago [-]
That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.
If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.
The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.
Aachen 56 minutes ago [-]
> they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use
In some places. If you're dumping excess energy onto their network, in some regions they'll also charge you for that
bandoti 3 hours ago [-]
Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything possible!
moffkalast 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah solarpunk is probably the most neglected out of all existing sci-fi punks, probably cause it's actually kinda nice and doesn't make a good setting for a gritty depressing story?
I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat project.
cedws 4 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised that phone manufacturers haven't already implemented a mesh network. I guess you could kind of call Apple's Find My network one, but if you want to smuggle arbitary data the bandwidth is very low. Maybe Apple's new mobile Wi-Fi chip is a precursor to an actual Internet mesh network.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Battery life is a big deal and anything with decent speed would hurt that a lot. People won’t want to sacrifice their battery to get strangers online.
burnt-resistor 2 hours ago [-]
It's exactly like Mountain View Google WiFi.
UltraSane 2 hours ago [-]
Meshtatisc's routing is extremely primitive and inefficient.
I feel like the better path to resiliency is not persistent radio connections between hobbyists on other sides of the state but rather intermittent ones between people on opposite sides of the bus and an application layer that arranges for people who are heading that way anyhow to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.
You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.
Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of long range skulduggery were to fail.
The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value targets: one where each user is equally an operator.
goda90 1 hours ago [-]
This idea sounds a lot like Secure Scuttlebutt[0]. I'm not sure the state of it. The client they link to on their website ceased development awhile ago.
I think that secure scuttlebutt (SSB) is a very good start, but eventually we'll need something besides an append-only log. Something that removes data that is no longer interesting. Something that, when it runs up against its storage quota, prunes data based on whether it is more/less trusted or likely to be interesting to a peer. Something that knows which peers I'm likely to be near in the future, knows which topics they're subscribed to, and which tries to be an efficient mailman based on that understanding.
But yeah, my vision is pretty much just SSB all grown up.
hashstring 14 minutes ago [-]
> to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.
What do you mean?
lljk_kennedy 7 hours ago [-]
> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work
I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic
ndr 7 hours ago [-]
I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.
tmountain 4 hours ago [-]
I guess it depends on your perspective. Here in Portugal, lots of people ended up sitting on their patios, chatting with friends, cooking on the grill, playing cards, sipping wine, and generally having a pretty good time. There was a collective groan around the small village where I live when the power came back on, and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning.
2 hours ago [-]
Aachen 50 minutes ago [-]
Right, it's fun to sip wine and chew bubblegum for a day, but that's not the scenario people are worried about
al_borland 4 hours ago [-]
The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.
But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
tcoff91 3 hours ago [-]
It’s absurd that we don’t require gas stations to have generators on-site. They have all the fuel they need to power them right there!!!
Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.
This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.
dghlsakjg 49 minutes ago [-]
Gas stations are private businesses, and they typically make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in the c-store.
Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.
chairmansteve 27 minutes ago [-]
I guess a government/population that cared about resilience would require them to add a few pennies/gallon onto the price to pay for backup generators. Maybe also bigger storage tanks.
geraldhh 2 hours ago [-]
absurdities not withstanding, this might actually be a good idea.
cogogo 2 hours ago [-]
Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in elevators. Don’t have exact numbers but there were A LOT of them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My wife was stuck on a train and that wasn’t so great either. Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be only a couple km away.
camillomiller 7 hours ago [-]
It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though.
There were disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.
dewey 7 hours ago [-]
That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.
AlecSchueler 4 hours ago [-]
But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only because they expected a resolution."
closewith 4 hours ago [-]
Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.
goda90 47 minutes ago [-]
To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To get boiling water you need water, a container for the water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.
djrj477dhsnv 3 hours ago [-]
Sterile bottles? Millions of babies around the world are doing just fine every day without that.
closewith 3 hours ago [-]
With breastfeeding, which millions can't, for whatever reason (even if only prior preference, you can't turn it on at will). Bottle feeding young babies without the ability to semi-sterilise formula and sterilise bottles will lead to higher infant mortality.
tonyoconnell 3 hours ago [-]
Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to feed their children safely.
collingreen 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully it isn't controversial to acknowledge that a few extra dead babies is actually a terrible thing not something you brush aside, right?
closewith 3 hours ago [-]
Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.
lucianbr 4 hours ago [-]
> Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications.
I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
AlecSchueler 4 hours ago [-]
Come on, what?
Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society we hear about?
The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed, there was space to have some debate about what positives could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live with outages alongside preparing to negate them.
I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.
killerstorm 7 hours ago [-]
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago [-]
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.
I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.
Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/
Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
axelthegerman 5 hours ago [-]
Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.
If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
chairmansteve 15 minutes ago [-]
Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't need batteries.
Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can’t be used for other things like charging my phone.
ta1243 5 hours ago [-]
Solar+battery is great for a few weeks locally with no power, or a couple of days nationally.
It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
antisthenes 3 hours ago [-]
> It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?
Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
XorNot 6 hours ago [-]
This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.
Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
g0db1t 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
GardenLetter27 5 hours ago [-]
Only because it didn't last overnight and wasn't at the peak of summer.
Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.
whiplash451 6 hours ago [-]
Did you check with hospitals, prisons and daycares how things went?
7 hours ago [-]
talkingtab 3 hours ago [-]
To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.
We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the future.
It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I personally would not miss. Until I did.
Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.
nunodonato 7 hours ago [-]
During peace, yes. If there is any sort of crisis, no
When Whatsapp and a bunch of social media went down a few years back I took a stroll outside that evening here in Berlin and the streets were weirdly buzzing. It was a bit surreal.
Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.
pino82 2 hours ago [-]
I can remember I was at a birthday party and the entire topic of the f*cking evening was when it will be online again. With everybody checking every 23 seconds.
I left that 'party' quite early.
lambdaone 4 hours ago [-]
Mesh radio bandwidth is pretty poor. Firstly, you have to compete with many interferers (albeit this might get better if the power goes down), including other LoRa radios, but more to the point, long-distance connections consume bandwidth and aquire delay and delay variation at every intermediate hop. It might be reasonable to use it for text messaging, but with per-hop bandwidth ranging from 0.3 kbps to 27 kbps, which will get divided down further over shared multi-hop links it will be impractical to use it for anything else except perhaps very-low-bandwidth telephony over short distances or visiting minimalist text-only websites.
It might make more sense if augmented by fixed multi-megabit point-to-point microwave radio links to act as a backbone, with LoRa only functioning as an access network.
I'd be interested to hear what experiences people have had with doing this for real.
bkummel 3 hours ago [-]
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
I've just realised I've talked my way into the idea of creating per-city club-operated backbone networks based on something like 100 Mbit point-to-point Ethernet-over-microwave links. With tall buildings as hubs, you might actually be able to build a decent mesh, with WiFi, LoRa or both acting as access networks. You'd definitely want to throttle per-client bandwidth to prevent people from abusing your very limited long-range mesh bandwidth. None of this would be cheap; decent microwave links cost thousands, and you'd need backup solar and battery power for every part of the network.
I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level, but coupled this with a really high gain parabolic dish (I'm thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable, either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has already built, or even manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and regulatory barriers are to implementation.
myself248 3 hours ago [-]
"Big ears, small mouth" is exactly what the regulations are designed to encourage, so I don't foresee regulatory issues.
You don't even need extra hardware for the duplexing; the common SX1276 chip has separate Tx and Rx pins which are typically combined on the PCB. All you need is to route a PCB that brings 'em out separately, if that's what you want to do.
In practice it's tricky to aim two dishes the exact same place, so using a single dish with a single antenna at its focus is probably quite a bit more practical. The SX1276 also has a PA control pin, invert that and you've got your LNA control signal. Or don't bother with the LNA, and simply mount the transceiver at the focus to minimize RF feedline losses. You'd give up a smidgen of performance but gain a lot of simplicity. (There would still be coax running down the boom, but it would be carrying the wifi/bluetooth signal outside the dish's aperture!)
lambdaone 13 minutes ago [-]
I didn't know about the chip having separate TX and RX pins. There must be a gap in the market for rooftop-to-rooftop LoRa transceivers that don't cost a fortune. Even using something like a 24 dB gain antenna would push range up by a factor of 10 relative to a simple 4 dB antenna, or get a substantial improvement in bandwidth/reliability at the same range. For an even simpler design, you could just put a 20 dB attenuator between the transmit port and the antenna, reducing the effective forward gain of 4 dB, while getting the full 24 dB in the opposite direction. Proper RF engineering details an exercise for the student etc.
liotier 7 hours ago [-]
Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?
Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?
Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.
Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !
Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?
An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.
myself248 3 hours ago [-]
Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.
I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.
Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.
wpm 1 hours ago [-]
I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day. Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS without phoning home to Apple for an activation.
myself248 1 hours ago [-]
It's time to sell your soul to Big Penguin.
bkummel 3 hours ago [-]
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
lambdaone 4 minutes ago [-]
The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres. They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc. between their networks over statically routed point-to-point IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet. (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)
For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.
blueflow 7 hours ago [-]
This article makes more sense if its coming from a city where only the large telco's are present.
Here Dresden (Germany), there are several volunteer organisations who laid wires through the city or have microwave-antennas (AG DSN, Bürgernetz, Freifunk), and there is a recently founded internet exchange run by volunteers (DD-IX). So as long as we have power, we got our own internet.
bjackman 2 hours ago [-]
It sounds like the author is envisaging a system that works without power (as long as the batteries last).
lambdaone 3 minutes ago [-]
The ISPs also have a system that runs without power so long as their batteries (and gensets) last. Typically 1 or 2 days without refuelling.
dansmith1919 5 hours ago [-]
Watch her 10-minute RIPE 90 talk and then listen to the first "question" for a short tutorial on how to behave like a prick: dude didn't even have a question, just wanted to let everyone know how much he knew about a somewhat related subject
ImPostingOnHN 3 hours ago [-]
that is one of my pet peeves: people who try to dominate discussions or make them about themselves (you might notice they say "I" a lot)
another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different times along the way
if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your question: *think* about the question first; compress it into 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark; say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, immediately be silent so the answerer can actually answer the question and get to other questioners
if you're worried they might not understand the question that way: do it anyways, and if they don't, wait for a chance to ask again (after others have had theirs)
nunobrito 7 hours ago [-]
OK but kind of outdated and incomplete. Meshcore is largely competing with Meshtastic nowadays: https://meshcore.co.uk/
To remember: LoRa only permits small text messages. Don't even think about images, voice nor binary files (I mean it).
Another option is APRS using satellite connections through a cheap chinese walkie-talkie (Quangsheng UV-K5) for 20 euros to send text messages.
alnwlsn 1 hours ago [-]
If I go to https://meshcore.co.uk/about.html, the fact that there is two youtube videos there and not a button that says "Download Docs PDF" shows me exactly how serious they are about "[We] connect people and things, without using the internet"
tecleandor 6 hours ago [-]
What I don't get about Meshcore is... What's their goal. They seem a commercial venture, their contact email is customers@..... I don't know they're license... I rather use meshtastic.
victorbjorklund 6 hours ago [-]
I think their basic idea is to have a more advanced (and therefore scaleable mesh) where you can have more control over the path your packets take. I dont get the impression they are very commercial. Seems to been started by people first approaching meshtastic with proposed changes to the algo and getting rejected and therefore "forking" (forking in quotes because I dont think they share any code)
MaKey 1 hours ago [-]
Their iOS / Android apps are closed source, which is a turnoff for me.
ChrisMarshallNY 7 hours ago [-]
Huh. Hadn’t heard of Meshcore before. Thanks for that. It sounds more organized than Meshtastic. Seems more polished, but also a bit more opaque (from my cursory examination). That may just be, because it’s not had as much time to get established. It has all the open credentials.
From her article:
> Their answer was both depressing and freeing: “You can’t. All you can do is be prepared with tools and a plan for when the crisis arrives. That’s when the organization will listen.”
That is so sad, but also, so true.
I was fortunate to have worked for a company that is over 100 years old, and that had weathered a couple of wars, depression, recession, market disruption, etc.
They were about as open to disaster planning as anyone, but they could also be head-in-the-sand knuckleheads. The biggest thing was the company had a fiscal and cultural conservative bent; quite unusual in the tech industry, these days.
Anyone that has managed a DR system, knows how difficult it is to get support. Disaster Recovery is expensive, resource-intensive, and difficult to test. It is also stuff people don’t want to think about. Sort of like insurance.
nunobrito 7 hours ago [-]
My suggestion as someone preparing for this kind of stuff since quite a while:
+ Quangsheng UV-K5
+ Android phone with 3.5 mm audio jack
+ APRSdroid installed
Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago [-]
The issue with satellite stuff, is that it’s pretty sensitive to active attack. It will be available for things like natural disasters, but not necessarily for war.
In either case, jamming is a possibility.
nunobrito 6 hours ago [-]
That is inaccurate. You will NOT be able to jam a satellite outside local areas, the amount of power to do is monstrous and likely to cause cancer for anyone around.
In a real scenario these things work. Please don't fall into "what if's" which are exotic and confused as things bigger than what they are.
ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago [-]
Well, from the comments, here, this sounds like a passionate topic, for folks.
I've always been interested in helping folks that help folks.
I started looking at Meshtastic, some years ago, but found the ecosystem to be a bit overly-complex, as is often the case, with "Swiss Army Knife" approaches.
nunobrito 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, indeed. If you are in the mood, dive a bit into APRS.
Best thing is the android app combo with the walkie-talkie. Tends to give a usable setup that works for voice and data.
elevation 5 hours ago [-]
> You will NOT be able to jam a satellite outside local areas
It is true that you will not be able to jam the _downlink_ frequency outside local areas.
But due to the FM capture effect, anyone else in the same hemisphere with a basic 100w transmitter (and appropriate antenna) on the _uplink_ frequency will be able to deny the satellite service to all the 5W Baofeng radios that preppers are stockpiling.
nunobrito 3 hours ago [-]
That level of argument is already at Reddit level where every little detail is a reason to be "right". This is tiresome.
Look: if someone is jamming something with a 100 watt transmitter which causes impact on the adversary, that location is quickly bombed because it is now a giant beacon that advertises its position.
I'll even throw a cheap appeal to authority and mention that I've done this stuff professionally in the military for a decade. I'll still trust more on the usability of my cheap walkie-talkie capable of +50km range and satellite texts than an exotic LoRa used on the ground by few internet warriors.
MaKey 6 hours ago [-]
You need a ham radio license to send data on APRS frequencies.
detaro 6 hours ago [-]
Depends. Various parts of Europe have bands that can be used licenseless and allow data, e.g. in Germany there was somewhat of a community doing APRS-over-CB (past tense because I haven't kept up if thats still a thing).
nunobrito 6 hours ago [-]
Except under emergency situations, which are the cases we are talking here.
detaro 6 hours ago [-]
Things like this really benefit from experience and practice though. If an emergency is the first time you try to really use your radio, it's probably not going all that well.
nunobrito 3 hours ago [-]
That is indeed true. Practicing is important. To remember: APRS is available on other frequencies and methods, one does not need a radio license to receive text messages.
APRS is friendly enough to permit sending messages using normal internet and receiving messages from friends while on the outdoors. However, all of this requires practice and know-how.
dahrkael 6 hours ago [-]
i always wondered if in case of natural disaster/war the state does really have the time and resources to chase unlicensed use of radio frequencies
detaro 6 hours ago [-]
it doesn't, but if you only start learning and using your equipment once disaster has hit you are a bit late (and possibly getting in the way of others trying to use radios properly).
nunobrito 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, that is the case. By the time you learn and get more equipment, you might as well get a proper radio license too. If you are interested on the topic, it is worth doing (in my opinion)
MaKey 6 hours ago [-]
AFAIK Meshcore was started by a disgruntled Meshtastic developer. It has got a smaller community and is messaging only, no sensor data transfer.
nunobrito 6 hours ago [-]
Then maybe time to know more rather than just throwing such claims.
The network itself does far more than what other projects were doing and is being fast adopted across Europe.
MaKey 4 hours ago [-]
> Then maybe time to know more rather than just throwing such claims.
To be fair, he actually says that he isn't able to do comparison vids, yet (because the UK is fairly flooded with Meshcore, so I guess it's a good reason).
The video is a promotion for Meshcore.
But I'm not sure that's necessarily a negative. Meshcore does seem to be a good thing.
The one issue, from my limited understanding, is that Meshocore doesn't seem to have integrated positional data, which would be very important for things like emergency response efforts.
tiagod 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't this video by the Meshcore developer?
ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago [-]
The problem with lora (and APRS over satellite... well, even ground APRS) is, that the bandwidth is very limited and usually only for "one person at a time", so while meshtastic/meshcore might be fine for tens of stations and a few users chatting, once those numbers get higher, the routing/signalization uses up most of the bandwidth, and many people sending messages at the same time makes the whole system very unreliable.
APRS is a bit better, because it requires ham licences and (usually) a bit more expensive equipment, but with "SmartBeaconing" and just a few hams, you get collisions (multiple people transmitting at the same time, effectively jamming eachother).
Reddit is usually full of preppers and other idiots buying these cheap chinese radios, usually without any knowledge and licences (that are needed to use them), and in turn they know nothing about actual use of those devices.... simplex range in urban environment is measured in hundreds of meters or maybe one or two large buildings between radioss, and repeaters will be in use by actual emergency servics and not really usable for any kind of "private use".
tldr: get a few books, a pack of cards, wait it out, not so long ago being unreachable away from home was the norm, and we managed.
akvadrako 5 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, getting a license is pretty easy. If you have a US address you can take 2 ten minute exams online for $10 to get General class; that's usable when traveling globally. It's a fixed pool of about 300 questions, so a half day of studying should be enough.
With the license, there are ham repeaters for FM and DMR. My cheap Chinese radio can reach the repeater 15km away.
It also supports APRS, but only for sending beacons. I can't really test it as there aren't repeaters around.
nunobrito 6 hours ago [-]
Please stop with the FUD.
Portugal was for 24 hours without electricity. LoRa networks were jammed and non-operational because the bandwidth is limited. APRS kept working.
It is far better to have a walkie-talkie that you can use as PMR on the 446 range and use for satellite text messages than an expensive toy that very few use.
And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago [-]
> And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
In portugal? Yes, you need one. Probably in every other EU country too
In USA too.
I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.
Also, you cannot use the same device for PMR and ham radio bands, the PMR device needs to be certified for PMR use, that means that it can only transmit on pmr frequencies and nowhere else. Other devices (eg. ham radio) cannot be used on PMR frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's regulation which exists for good reason, because in cases of actual emergencies, trained ham operators can assist actual emergency services with communication, and that's impossible if every idiot with a baofeng jams the channels.
elevation 4 hours ago [-]
> I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.
Parent is referring to the “Safety of life and protection of property” rule [0].
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
This rules applies to:
> the use by an amateur station
Not every billy and bobby with a baofeng are an amateur station.
Luckily, at the beginning of part 97 there are definitions of such words (you have to open the full document, not just this article)
> Amateur station. A station in an amateur radio service consisting of the apparatus necessary for carrying on radiocommunications.
So, for something to be an "amateur station", you need an "apparatus" (some kind of radio transmitter) and it has to be a part of "amateur radio service". That too is defined in the same document:
> Amateur radio services. The amateur service, the amateur-satellite service and the radio amateur civil emergency service.
It's not RACES (that's defined below), not satellite, so let's see what "amateur service is", again, definition in the same document
> Amateur service. A radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that is, duly authorized persons interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest.
So, for that rule to apply, you need a device (an apparatus), that has to be used for self-training etc (read above), for noncommercial, personal aim by a licenced ("duly authorized") person. Only then can you break other rules (eg power limits) in situations described in rule 403 you linked above.
Without a licence, a radio is just a radio, eg. a business band radio (like many motorolas are), and nothing in the part 97 (regulating amateur radio) applies to the user of that radio. Only when a licenced ham uses that (or any other radio, or even a homemade transmitter), in a specific way (described above) that "just-a-radio" becomes an amateur station.
nunobrito 6 hours ago [-]
Again with FUD.
In Portugal you are legally permitted to use channel 9 (27.065 MHz) in addition to the PMR channels. The hard line has always been on public safety bands. From a long time cooperation with the authorities (especially around the Azores) there was always an informal permission for that kind of usage across boats and islands because communication is difficult there.
Last but not least: taking the radio license exam is NOT a drama. Anyone can apply and get the radio license when they are serious into this topic.
ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago [-]
What fud?
Channel 9 is a CB channel, and neither quanshengs nor baofengs work on those frequencies at all, but you need a certified/type-accepted CB radio to use on that frequency.
Same with PMR, you need a PMR radio to use on pmr frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's just hardware limits and regulation.
Yes, 12yo kids can get an amateur radio licence, it's easy, but you still need a licence to transmit on ham bands, and you still cannot legally use a baofeng (except the few pmr models) or a quansheng on PMR frequencies, those radios don't transmit on cb freqencies at all, and there are no legal "you don't need a licence in an emergency" exceptions.
harvey9 5 hours ago [-]
I have a ham radio and still not got around to getting my license. I never transmit on it now but in a proper crisis I am not going to worry about being prosecuted by the radio authority.
nunobrito 3 hours ago [-]
And you shouldn't worry about such thing under those situations. Wouldn't make any sense except for bureaucrats.
You should worry about knowing the procedures, the channels, how to engage in communication with the hardware available to you.
misteriji2 1 hours ago [-]
The same applies to driving... you have to know the road rules, how the car behaves in what situations, how to drive in bad weather, heavy traffic, etc.
Now the best way is to get licenced and drive (=use a radio) in "normal" cirumstances to get experienced before an emergency. Somehow 12yo kids manage to get licenced, but preppers can't.
misteriji2 5 hours ago [-]
Your neighbor has access to a car, but still hasn't got around to get his drivers licence. In a proper crisis, he'll google "how to drive a car?" and "what does the third pedal do in a car?", and won't worry about being prosecuted by the driving authority.
You will in turn have to share the road with him in the same way as other radio amateurs (and possibly rescue services) will have to share the spectrum with you. You transmitting on a repeaters input frequency without a subtone set will in turn jam the repeater (PLL is before the TSQL) will make communications impossible in the same way as your neigbor stuck in the middle of the road with a burnt clutch will make driving impossible for others.
But hey, stay lazy, don't get a licence, i'm sure you'll be able to figure it all out fast when you're knee deep in flood waters.
elevation 3 hours ago [-]
> i'm sure you'll be able to figure it all out fast
Even if you do, a radio by itself is useless unless you can trust the people on the other end.
Perhaps your generator won’t start. A voice on the radio sounds like a mechanic and claims you need a new spark plug. He can offer you one if you can meet him in a neighborhood 3 minutes from your house. Is this a benevolent actor with small engine expertise and a garage full of spare parts? A well meaning elderly man with dementia? An opportunist luring you into a robbery?
You lose a tremendous tactical advantage in this situation if you’ve never met any local radio operators, gotten a sense of where they live and what they do for a living. Some are skilled experts. Some are blowhards who confidently give bad advice. Some live near you. Some are 100 miles away. You can figure it out, but it takes time that you don’t have in the middle of a disaster.
Get your license. Join your local Amateur Radio Club. Use your radio to chat with someone at least once a week. If you have signal quality issues, experiment with upgrading your equipment. Then the radio in your bug out bag will be of some value to you.
nunobrito 1 hours ago [-]
That is one of the best comments here and reasons for any prepper to consider a radio license.
Human networks can be stronger than radio waves, join your local radio club.
nunobrito 3 hours ago [-]
You don't need a radio license to receive radio messages, that is valid also for satellite messages received on walkie-talkies.
This fact alone is incredibly important to at the very minimum known what the heck is going on. Suddenly you have a cheap device in your hands that can receive updates relevant to survivors and victims.
In Portugal exist the 3-3-3 plans for anyone to practice using a radio. These are regular-weekly sessions with a lot of people joining.
misteriji2 1 hours ago [-]
But who will send messages to you? Including satellite messages?
In most countries emergency services have moved over to tetra or dmr, with encryption, and all the public related info is broadcasted on "normal" broadcast fm, where you need a normal fm radio, not a ham transciever.
estsauver 7 hours ago [-]
* I would consider adding a T-1000 device to the recommended list of devices, it's about the size of a credit card and works very well to add Meshtastic to phones. https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Card-Tracker-T1000-E-fo... It's a lot easier (in my opinion) to get people to stash a radio and remember how to power it to Bluetooth then to get setup from 0 on a new device. I think I paid about 40 euros each when I bought a pair.
* I have a Starlink mini--in the event that there is ever a broadly disconnecting event I'd be happy to share access to it. I keep it pretty much exclusively for emergency use and occasional camping/rural holiday house vacations. You might want to consider one too? They're ~250 euros new, which for someone who's starting a club for anything seems like a plausible expense. I believe there's a chinese version in case you don't want to trust the whims and emotions of Musk.
* https://kiwix.org/en/applications/ is pretty useful if you'd like to have an archive of technical information, wikipedia, stack exchange etc.
* I try and keep whatever feels like the smartest open weight LLMs at the time available so if something real bad ever happened it'd still be available. I might add that idea to your preparedness list too--I'd probably take LM Studio with Gemma 3 over another random engineer on the Meshtastic channel :)
* Would you share channel config details for your IRC community? I'm happy to join.
MaKey 7 hours ago [-]
Regarding the T1000-E:
> Note: Currently, LR1110 radios are unable to receive Meshtastic packets from the older SX127x radios, it requires a breaking change to fix this. Transmitting works and when hopping through an SX126x radio, you can still receive packets from SX127x radios.
I think that's totally fair if you're primarily working in rural/not dense communities. If you're in a major city, in practice it just doesn't matter and ease of use is king. In a disaster, everyone with a meshtastic radio has it on. Your messages will propagate just fine.
amenghra 6 hours ago [-]
Starlink mini has a monthly cost, right? So it wouldn't be just ~250€ but more like 250€ + 50€/mo.
messe 6 hours ago [-]
I thought so too, but apparently on starlink roam you can pause service (by the sounds of it, indefinitely), only restarting when you need it:
> You have the ability to pause and unpause service at any time, with billing occurring monthly.
If the internet is down how do you unpause the service?
messe 3 hours ago [-]
I think you still have access to whatever user-portal starlink uses, so you can unpause it that way. But I have not confirmed this, and could be mistaken. The documentation only mentions that when you are out of data you have access to that page, it doesn't mention anything about when your plan is paused.
> If you exceed the allotted data on the Roam 50GB plan and have not opted-in for additional data, you will be unable to use the internet except to access your Starlink account, from which you can add additional data or change plans.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
If you're not using it you don't have to pay the monthly cost. So buy the dish and just don't activate the service.
Fokamul 5 hours ago [-]
1. Meshtastic / LoRa is just bad for communication, it has so many problems
2. In case of conflict, everyone who starts LoRa gets delivery of artillery shell/rocket on their position.
Just like in Ukraine, try to go there and start up stock firmware DJI drone there and see what happens :)
Same when using radios in UA, no.1 rule is to NOT use encrypted radios, I like this example the most, because it goes against common sense, why would you want to use unencrypted radios so enemies can see your whole communication.
Reason behind this is following, encrypted radio traffic is very interesting for enemy, so it means if someone using it, he must be someone important -> send shell, badabum.
looofooo0 4 hours ago [-]
If it is that easy to become an artillery target, you can use it to your advantage. Randomly place LoRa devices in area near the front (by autonomous or fiber optic drone drop to decrease risk). Switch and off by some random timer and see the enemy deplete its shells and drones.
XorNot 2 hours ago [-]
"the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" applies in other circumstances too.
But the wider point is generally that just because something is less effective doesn't make it useless, and just because something is effective doesn't make it dominating.
If an enemy has an artillery advantage, then shelling obvious decoys is still taking decoys off the field, which you now need to replace. But worse, their existence is giving away the fact you're active in the area, and their placement is giving away your operational range - i.e. how far can a person move on foot over rough terrain? How far in a vehicle? etc. What's the effective range of their normal infantry weapons - if you know there's a decoy then the trap has a specific radius if it is a trap.
All on the bet that they will in fact run out of shells - or in the case of drones, they won't even run out since a drone can much more easily be re-targeted.
looofooo0 45 minutes ago [-]
Well you entering deep level of game theory here. Can you distinguish the decoy from the real and what resources you need to spend (e.g. LoRa device in a home)? How much is the signal that you can deploy decoys worth? Isn't deploying decoys below some noise level of frontline drone activity and the enemy cannot learn nothing? How many shells do you need to destroy a decoy? How certain you are about the destruction?
aamederen 7 hours ago [-]
For a more baby-steps approach to resiliency, one might start running software on less-virtualized computers, creating a small home-lab, running software on bare-metal hardware that you actually own.
NoboruWataya 5 hours ago [-]
Also related though maybe not resiliency-focused: It's quite easy now to download all of Wikipedia and all of Project Gutenberg to a hard drive, so that whatever problems you have in the post-apocalyptic hellscape, boredom won't be one of them.
Kiwix is the best software I have found for this and they make an extensive library of materials available for download themselves, which includes the aforementioned but also many other resources that would be helpful in a disaster scenario: https://library.kiwix.org/
chinathrow 7 hours ago [-]
Many people already do that (e.g. I use Linux on a Laptop- I consider this bare-metal).
The way I read this, it's more about what is needed to get services back up after a large scale loss of critical infrastructure: communication to other network/internet/infrastructure professionals.
greybox 5 hours ago [-]
I spent the weekend moving all my personal projects away from github & AWS to to dedicated hardware in the EU, still not in my own home, but I'm toying with the idea of purchasing some hardware to run gitlab etc from my home network.
Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a financial hit for my paranoia.
bravesoul2 7 hours ago [-]
Or even just install local software. Get a computer that lasts (have at least one non laptop). Have maybe some maps and Wikipedia locally.
Maybe walkie talkies too? Pretty simple to use!
fer 7 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: At least one ham radio store ran out of walkie talkies during the power outage in Spain, also there was plenty of chatter on 446 when it's normally quite quiet.
avhception 6 hours ago [-]
I host many services from a small rack in my home using FreeBSD jails.
pwndByDeath 2 hours ago [-]
Its been on HN before but its worth a repeat
https://reticulum.network/
Its got more optimization for a low bandwidth LoRa without the brute force stuff of meshtastic
jvanderbot 3 hours ago [-]
Just dropping a HAMWAN link for anyone who is interested in higher power / longer range links. https://hamwan.org/
Brendinooo 4 hours ago [-]
This sort of thing is interesting but I guess I've always found it really hard to invest my limited time and money into prepper-type stuff.
Are there use cases for this sort of thing that could make it worthwhile even if doomsday doesn't arrive?
b0a04gl 7 hours ago [-]
but who has the gear, who keeps it charged, who actually shows up when the net goes dark. tech's the easy part. the hard part is getting 5 neighbors to agree on a channel, a meeting point, and a backup plan they’ll actually remember.
also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need them
BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago [-]
I have a WAP on my shed roof and batteries that can power my gear for a few hours without the grid. In the absence of other WiFi networks the one atop my shed would stand out as a rallying point.
(It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we didn't have power outages).
alganet 6 hours ago [-]
That's why you can't rely on it.
If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.
The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building long-term resilience is much harder.
IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.
kcaseg 7 hours ago [-]
saveitforparts has multiple videos on meshstatic, if you want to see it in action, it is super interesting, but not without flaws apparently
Pros:
- it can actually scale past 20 devices
- Forward secrecy encryption
- Is designed to support multiple underlying transport systems such as TCP or LoRa
- Announce based routing rather than flooding the entire network which is order of magnitudes faster
Cons:
- Not as many nodes as Meshtastic has
- Python implementation with no C implementation (can be speed up with cython however)
alnwlsn 26 minutes ago [-]
Nice, it took less than a minute to find a PDF of the docs. That's already more seriously "offline" than the alternatives.
stevenAthompson 3 hours ago [-]
Is it legal in the USA? I seem to recall that ham operators aren't allowed to encrypt their traffic, that's one reason I never got around to getting licensed. Maybe LoRs allows for it because it's unlicensed?
stevenAthompson 2 hours ago [-]
Ignore me, I answered my own question. Encryption is still illegal on HAM bands, but legal for things like LoRa that are unlicensed (hence WiFi).
specproc 7 hours ago [-]
I read the title and the first few sentences as resilience _to_ rather than resilience _for_ the internet.
nancyminusone 2 hours ago [-]
>...all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat
Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
te_chris 2 hours ago [-]
I assume an allusion to when there was a coup in the 90’s in Russia the govt put the ballet on tv
lormayna 7 hours ago [-]
I am into Meshtastic but the coverage, at least in Italy, is low and depends a lot on the position.
If you are in a city, you can get many neighbors nodes, otherwise you need to be at high altitude, relying on other nodes or use a directional antenna.
Anyway, it's a nice hobby to learn a lot about solar powered systems and antennas/propagation.
I think that one of the best use cases for Meshtastic is to use it during protests, especially in authoritarian countries.
powgpu 7 hours ago [-]
yeah it is kinda like starting your own internet infrastructure.
For protest there are already bluetooth messenger for that:
There is also a version with Rak chip instead that ESP32, that is a lot less power hungry and it's perfect for a solar powered module.
rubyfan 4 hours ago [-]
I’m almost to the point of turning the internet off on purpose. The noise level is so high it’s almost not worth it anymore.
(but I get this is geared towards communication resilience)
firesteelrain 3 hours ago [-]
Why not something like WinLink which works over short and long distances using Ham Radio? It even has an email gateway.
Then, there is JS8Call, PSK, SSB, FM, etc
qwertox 7 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking about an idea, that maybe it would be worthwhile for a city to create a wireless network where it uses rooftops for a mesh.
This WiFi offers a low-data-rate (<5-10 mbit/s) service to seniors for free or a very low fee (~3€/month), without service guarantees, but honest best-effort.
In the case when an internet problem arises, which affects the city's it-infrastructure, the city can switch to this WiFi to have their city-wide services still interconnected, while the seniors get kicked off of the network during this time.
MaKey 7 hours ago [-]
freifunk.net is building these mesh networks but based on volunteers without a fee. Big communities have thousands of nodes.
Elaris 4 hours ago [-]
I think we should focus on collaboration, not just individual action. Many times, we don't react until a problem occurs. This reminds us to be proactive, not reactive.
xpe 2 hours ago [-]
One thought -- more of a question -- and I'm not the first person to ask it -- How can we design a 'smaller' kind of internet? One that is less data hungry, less commercial, but still sustainable (how?), more of a community vibe, with distributed governance, less enshittification. Think of it like a maintainable garden. One that still works without a lot of extra effort, such as constant browser 'innovations' or bandwidth upgrades. Something more like a hardscaped garden instead of a typical American-style monoculture grass lawn requiring nonstop interventions to make it look pristine. This would have many benefits, including resilience, redundancy, and archival. Yes, I realize I'm conflating layers and maybe even asking too much. But sometimes it feels good to dream. At the very least, it is a genuine question I can use to evaluate various proposals and ideas in this general area.
NoboruWataya 2 hours ago [-]
The Gopher and (more recently) Gemini protocols are something like this.
On a local level, I feel like we can probably do better than just text messaging capabilities. Mesh network covering the village, with someone running mirrors of essential services in their basement (local email routing, wikipedia, etc)
nunobrito 7 hours ago [-]
just remember that even that won't last long. Electricity is an expensive resource and you won't get spare parts to keep the Wi-Fi running for long.
At most you will only be able to start a few Android-phone hotpspots and share files. That is the reality of it.
Ginden 3 hours ago [-]
Electricity is not really an expensive resource for communications. You need like a single rooftop to provide WiFi for the entire village.
nunobrito 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe for professional communications. For cases where the grid is gone, you will quickly see how quickly you stop using electricity for luxuries such as that one.
At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router running only on solar? Very seldom.
nicolaslem 3 hours ago [-]
The price of solar panels and batteries keeps falling. You can go an Amazon today and get a setup that can power a switch/router/AP 24/7 in winter for a few hundred dollars.
stevenhuang 2 hours ago [-]
A mid range router uses about 10W or about a dollar a month.
It will not be a problem at all to power it completely on a small 100W panel.
feiss 8 hours ago [-]
This is fantastic. However, I only see the use case of messaging through the Meshtastic clients. Is there any other thing one can do over this setup, like Gopher or IRC?
erremerre 5 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't having something like this, you automatically became a target in case of the case of war?
yannickdoteu 7 hours ago [-]
any people around Leuven, Belgium that want to start a club?
amelius 7 hours ago [-]
> a flood-forward mesh protocol
Is this scalable?
M2Ys4U 6 hours ago [-]
In a word, no.
7 hours ago [-]
1oooqooq 2 hours ago [-]
people will try to design a plan to save humanity with Chinese radios, but won't sign up for a basic technician license. sigh
so many wrong assumptions on that article.
crimsoneer 7 hours ago [-]
As someone who has done a fair bit of playing with Meshtastic in the last few months, it's worth really managing expectations... it is in no way a replacement for any sort of internet. It's a way of sending very short text messages, with a system that is really quite flaky in any kind of built-up urban environment. Don't get me wrong, it's great fun, but there's a reason stuff like Ham radio is robust.
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cedws 4 hours ago [-]
At the beginning of COVID many countries had toilet paper shortages because of mass hysteria. Now imagine how ugly things would get if there wasn't enough food to go around. It's not that far fetched if there's a supply chain disruption. There's no secret food reserves at supermarkets, they sell products just-in-time.
If you look more, you'll most likely find more discussions. The things on StackExchange are a bit lame. There was a blog somewhere that posted about climate data for about a decade and had a discussion going on for maybe 2 months... I don't know if can find that again. Soon after the discussion of that paper the blog was pretty dead...
2 hours ago [-]
gchamonlive 6 hours ago [-]
I remember bank run being one of the reasons why SVB failed, and also during the COVID pandemic people rushing to buy toilet paper has a terrible effect on the market.
However I don't think these cases are anywhere close to the level of widespread disruption that the list of dangers can bring.
Do you happen to know instances where mass hysteria had a similar effect on disrupting global supply chains or communication services than war, geopolitics etc?
bananapub 3 hours ago [-]
A bank run started by our esteemed VC brethren having a mass panic attack, then getting their own money out, then telling people they had a financial stake in to get their money out, et voila your bank is now running.
rikafurude21 6 hours ago [-]
GCP went down over a null pointer exception recently, taking down a good chunk of sites, and people claimed that it was the start of WW3, since obviously it would begin with an internet blackout - Meanwhile everyone is refreshing their feeds constantly to see the latest hypersonic missiles hit civilian houses in HD quality."war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria. People just write buggy software
gchamonlive 6 hours ago [-]
> "war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria
It is until it isn't. Better not to write off these dangers and to just focus on keeping the general public in the dark to avoid mass hysteria, and treat these other threats with the required respect they deserve just in case.
t0lo 5 hours ago [-]
I tried to parse it by reading the intro and the conclusion. Is it trying to say some of the heating effects will be potentially saturated and limited when co2 increases, decreasing temperature? York and Princeton seem legit but don't know about how well received this is
throwaway43156 4 hours ago [-]
They're saying "The effects of the first ton of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere is much higher than the effects of the next ton. Now there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that dumping any more into it will have a negligible effect."
The implication is "There's no need to worry about CO2 at this point, it's already done the damage it can, so let's call our global warming concerns off". But the models may be suspect (see my other post), so I wouldn't go celebrate just yet. Let's at least wait for peer review or submission to a notable journal to see how well received it is.
adornKey 4 hours ago [-]
The essence is that each frequency alone is eventually saturated. (can't absorb more than everything). If you add more CO2 you'll start to absorb more in new frequencies, but the effect is getting smaller. To calculate how much the numbers add up, there is HITRAN-Database with a lot of data about the absorption lines.
About these calculations there's interesting material out there. I think there's even software to download, and feed with a download of HITRAN-Data.
NoboruWataya 6 hours ago [-]
Mass hysteria arguably belongs on the list of Bad Things, but I don't think it is as likely to knock out your internet or power supply for a prolonged period. Maybe more of a reason for a Toilet Roll Resiliency Club.
adornKey 5 hours ago [-]
Mass Hysteria is seriously dangerous. A few years ago I've seen a full room of people applauding Military for ordering more tanks. ("Enough to have those shot down by Russia in the calculation"). And young German politicians being proud of it. They even said publicly "The best outcome of the Ukraine War would be reinstallment of the old German-Russian border."
Germany has the potential to go full Nazi again... And the population is mostly crazy in a scary way "We need sirens", "We need bunkers", "How can I make my pupils go for a career in the army"...
Instead of of investing time into making a mesh network. I'd like to see more energy spent on preventing real dangers. If people don't start going against the real troublemakers, loss of internet will be very low on the list of problems of the future.
And still nobody I've ever seen in public speak or comment about climate has ever read any paper on atmosphere physics... Before you build a mesh network against climate change, people should better read at least a few papers about atmosphere physics first.
pharrington 4 hours ago [-]
Please explain yourself, downvoters!
mynegation 3 hours ago [-]
Commenting on voting is against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). To understand why your comment fares as it does, helps to re-read the guidelines in their entirety.
pharrington 1 hours ago [-]
I know why my comment was downvoted, and I know what the guidelines are. I wanted to know why people were downvoting adornKey's completely reasonable comment.
computerthings 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
permo-w 5 hours ago [-]
you're suggesting that the internet makes well-spread rumours less likely?
charcircuit 7 hours ago [-]
No mention of starlink? Even if the internet is entirely down locally your packets could be routed to the other side of Earth before making it to the internet.
Starlink is much simpler for the average consumer to setup than what this article suggests.
swiftcoder 7 hours ago [-]
The article is talking about the war in Ukraine specifically, and not only has the US repeatedly threatened to disable their starlink access if they don't agree to a treaty, Musk himself admitted to disabling starlink during a Ukrainian raid a couple of years back.
Resiliency isn't found by relying on corporations who are subject to interference by foreign nations.
kcaseg 7 hours ago [-]
I guess being dependent on the daily mood of some random guy in Texas isn't really resilience.
powgpu 7 hours ago [-]
Well IMHO it is more about if the infrastructure is centralized or decentralized. In a centralized infrastructure we are all at the whim of someone like Musk/Gates fill in the ______
A mesh network and federated services will not rely on one actor or server. And if you are in middle of no where and only a random guy from Texas is hosting, then maybe start your own node if he is unreliable.
Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago [-]
Sure, as a backup to your regular internet it could work, and can be shared with your community. However, the objective is to be independent from any infrastructure. The US has boycotted the ICC in the Netherlands already, if the ICC were to arrest American or Israeli war criminals they may choose to expand that boycot to the whole country, which includes Starlink access.
victorbjorklund 6 hours ago [-]
Can't rely on Elon in cases of an emergency.
bananapub 7 hours ago [-]
a pretty important part of everyone's strategic planning in 2025 needs to be resilience to random rich American cunts deciding to inflict harm on you or your country.
xvilka 7 hours ago [-]
Another thing is to update mesh stack to more modern language, to improve security and resiliency - projects like B.A.T.M.A.N, Babel, OSLR, FRRouting, etc would largely benefit from being rewritten from pure C to language like Rust.
nunobrito 7 hours ago [-]
Being "modern" is a poor excuse. Code in C can be ported to anywhere, code in your "modern" language can only be understood by a few and is not portable anymore to other languages.
Please don't confuse security with resilience, they might be connected in some dots but have fundamentally different purposes.
ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago [-]
Why? I mean... we had many "modern languages" that are not "modern" anymore, but the code in C still works, and when rust loses the "language of the week" status, the code in C will continue to be developed, and rust will be like go, ruby and others.
xvilka 6 hours ago [-]
Because of the memory safety, better type system, and better infrastructure of testing. There's even no well-maintained property-based testing framework for C. Rust provides all of this out of the box or with popular crates.
ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, multiple languages do that and many more will.... will you rewrite all the software ever written to any new language that has something new? The current code works.
The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.
- To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the toolchains and flasher programs you need.
- The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer.
- The docs are hosted at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out, but this is seemingly not a primary concern.
I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!
Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868 MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down the road. While I understand that height is key (and my antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates very rapidly.
So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the practical execution falls short. I think established methods like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior, especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio incredibly affordable (around €20)
I have been meaning to try it out
https://unsigned.io/rnode/
Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.
The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.
The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.
If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.
The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.
In some places. If you're dumping excess energy onto their network, in some regions they'll also charge you for that
https://web.archive.org/web/20111119205258/http://fabfi.fabf...
I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat project.
https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.
Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of long range skulduggery were to fail.
The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value targets: one where each user is equally an operator.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
But yeah, my vision is pretty much just SSB all grown up.
I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic
But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.
This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.
Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.
I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society we hear about?
The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed, there was space to have some debate about what positives could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live with outages alongside preparing to negate them.
I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.
I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.
Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/
Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
https://www.notechmagazine.com/category/refrigeration
Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".
It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?
Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.
We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the future.
It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I personally would not miss. Until I did.
Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.
Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.
I left that 'party' quite early.
It might make more sense if augmented by fixed multi-megabit point-to-point microwave radio links to act as a backbone, with LoRa only functioning as an access network.
I'd be interested to hear what experiences people have had with doing this for real.
I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level, but coupled this with a really high gain parabolic dish (I'm thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable, either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has already built, or even manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and regulatory barriers are to implementation.
You don't even need extra hardware for the duplexing; the common SX1276 chip has separate Tx and Rx pins which are typically combined on the PCB. All you need is to route a PCB that brings 'em out separately, if that's what you want to do.
In practice it's tricky to aim two dishes the exact same place, so using a single dish with a single antenna at its focus is probably quite a bit more practical. The SX1276 also has a PA control pin, invert that and you've got your LNA control signal. Or don't bother with the LNA, and simply mount the transceiver at the focus to minimize RF feedline losses. You'd give up a smidgen of performance but gain a lot of simplicity. (There would still be coax running down the boom, but it would be carrying the wifi/bluetooth signal outside the dish's aperture!)
Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?
Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.
Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !
Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?
An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.
I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.
Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.
For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.
Here Dresden (Germany), there are several volunteer organisations who laid wires through the city or have microwave-antennas (AG DSN, Bürgernetz, Freifunk), and there is a recently founded internet exchange run by volunteers (DD-IX). So as long as we have power, we got our own internet.
another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different times along the way
if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your question: *think* about the question first; compress it into 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark; say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, immediately be silent so the answerer can actually answer the question and get to other questioners
if you're worried they might not understand the question that way: do it anyways, and if they don't, wait for a chance to ask again (after others have had theirs)
To remember: LoRa only permits small text messages. Don't even think about images, voice nor binary files (I mean it).
Another option is APRS using satellite connections through a cheap chinese walkie-talkie (Quangsheng UV-K5) for 20 euros to send text messages.
From her article:
> Their answer was both depressing and freeing: “You can’t. All you can do is be prepared with tools and a plan for when the crisis arrives. That’s when the organization will listen.”
That is so sad, but also, so true.
I was fortunate to have worked for a company that is over 100 years old, and that had weathered a couple of wars, depression, recession, market disruption, etc.
They were about as open to disaster planning as anyone, but they could also be head-in-the-sand knuckleheads. The biggest thing was the company had a fiscal and cultural conservative bent; quite unusual in the tech industry, these days.
Anyone that has managed a DR system, knows how difficult it is to get support. Disaster Recovery is expensive, resource-intensive, and difficult to test. It is also stuff people don’t want to think about. Sort of like insurance.
+ Quangsheng UV-K5 + Android phone with 3.5 mm audio jack + APRSdroid installed
Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
In either case, jamming is a possibility.
In a real scenario these things work. Please don't fall into "what if's" which are exotic and confused as things bigger than what they are.
I've always been interested in helping folks that help folks.
I started looking at Meshtastic, some years ago, but found the ecosystem to be a bit overly-complex, as is often the case, with "Swiss Army Knife" approaches.
Best thing is the android app combo with the walkie-talkie. Tends to give a usable setup that works for voice and data.
It is true that you will not be able to jam the _downlink_ frequency outside local areas.
But due to the FM capture effect, anyone else in the same hemisphere with a basic 100w transmitter (and appropriate antenna) on the _uplink_ frequency will be able to deny the satellite service to all the 5W Baofeng radios that preppers are stockpiling.
Look: if someone is jamming something with a 100 watt transmitter which causes impact on the adversary, that location is quickly bombed because it is now a giant beacon that advertises its position.
I'll even throw a cheap appeal to authority and mention that I've done this stuff professionally in the military for a decade. I'll still trust more on the usability of my cheap walkie-talkie capable of +50km range and satellite texts than an exotic LoRa used on the ground by few internet warriors.
APRS is friendly enough to permit sending messages using normal internet and receiving messages from friends while on the outdoors. However, all of this requires practice and know-how.
The network itself does far more than what other projects were doing and is being fast adopted across Europe.
Then please educate me, I'm listening.
The video is a promotion for Meshcore.
But I'm not sure that's necessarily a negative. Meshcore does seem to be a good thing.
The one issue, from my limited understanding, is that Meshocore doesn't seem to have integrated positional data, which would be very important for things like emergency response efforts.
APRS is a bit better, because it requires ham licences and (usually) a bit more expensive equipment, but with "SmartBeaconing" and just a few hams, you get collisions (multiple people transmitting at the same time, effectively jamming eachother).
Reddit is usually full of preppers and other idiots buying these cheap chinese radios, usually without any knowledge and licences (that are needed to use them), and in turn they know nothing about actual use of those devices.... simplex range in urban environment is measured in hundreds of meters or maybe one or two large buildings between radioss, and repeaters will be in use by actual emergency servics and not really usable for any kind of "private use".
tldr: get a few books, a pack of cards, wait it out, not so long ago being unreachable away from home was the norm, and we managed.
With the license, there are ham repeaters for FM and DMR. My cheap Chinese radio can reach the repeater 15km away.
It also supports APRS, but only for sending beacons. I can't really test it as there aren't repeaters around.
Portugal was for 24 hours without electricity. LoRa networks were jammed and non-operational because the bandwidth is limited. APRS kept working.
It is far better to have a walkie-talkie that you can use as PMR on the 446 range and use for satellite text messages than an expensive toy that very few use.
And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
In portugal? Yes, you need one. Probably in every other EU country too
In USA too.
I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.
Also, you cannot use the same device for PMR and ham radio bands, the PMR device needs to be certified for PMR use, that means that it can only transmit on pmr frequencies and nowhere else. Other devices (eg. ham radio) cannot be used on PMR frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's regulation which exists for good reason, because in cases of actual emergencies, trained ham operators can assist actual emergency services with communication, and that's impossible if every idiot with a baofeng jams the channels.
Parent is referring to the “Safety of life and protection of property” rule [0].
[O]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
This rules applies to:
> the use by an amateur station
Not every billy and bobby with a baofeng are an amateur station.
Luckily, at the beginning of part 97 there are definitions of such words (you have to open the full document, not just this article)
> Amateur station. A station in an amateur radio service consisting of the apparatus necessary for carrying on radiocommunications.
So, for something to be an "amateur station", you need an "apparatus" (some kind of radio transmitter) and it has to be a part of "amateur radio service". That too is defined in the same document:
> Amateur radio services. The amateur service, the amateur-satellite service and the radio amateur civil emergency service.
It's not RACES (that's defined below), not satellite, so let's see what "amateur service is", again, definition in the same document
> Amateur service. A radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that is, duly authorized persons interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest.
So, for that rule to apply, you need a device (an apparatus), that has to be used for self-training etc (read above), for noncommercial, personal aim by a licenced ("duly authorized") person. Only then can you break other rules (eg power limits) in situations described in rule 403 you linked above.
Without a licence, a radio is just a radio, eg. a business band radio (like many motorolas are), and nothing in the part 97 (regulating amateur radio) applies to the user of that radio. Only when a licenced ham uses that (or any other radio, or even a homemade transmitter), in a specific way (described above) that "just-a-radio" becomes an amateur station.
In Portugal you are legally permitted to use channel 9 (27.065 MHz) in addition to the PMR channels. The hard line has always been on public safety bands. From a long time cooperation with the authorities (especially around the Azores) there was always an informal permission for that kind of usage across boats and islands because communication is difficult there.
Last but not least: taking the radio license exam is NOT a drama. Anyone can apply and get the radio license when they are serious into this topic.
Channel 9 is a CB channel, and neither quanshengs nor baofengs work on those frequencies at all, but you need a certified/type-accepted CB radio to use on that frequency.
Same with PMR, you need a PMR radio to use on pmr frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's just hardware limits and regulation.
Yes, 12yo kids can get an amateur radio licence, it's easy, but you still need a licence to transmit on ham bands, and you still cannot legally use a baofeng (except the few pmr models) or a quansheng on PMR frequencies, those radios don't transmit on cb freqencies at all, and there are no legal "you don't need a licence in an emergency" exceptions.
You should worry about knowing the procedures, the channels, how to engage in communication with the hardware available to you.
Now the best way is to get licenced and drive (=use a radio) in "normal" cirumstances to get experienced before an emergency. Somehow 12yo kids manage to get licenced, but preppers can't.
You will in turn have to share the road with him in the same way as other radio amateurs (and possibly rescue services) will have to share the spectrum with you. You transmitting on a repeaters input frequency without a subtone set will in turn jam the repeater (PLL is before the TSQL) will make communications impossible in the same way as your neigbor stuck in the middle of the road with a burnt clutch will make driving impossible for others.
But hey, stay lazy, don't get a licence, i'm sure you'll be able to figure it all out fast when you're knee deep in flood waters.
Even if you do, a radio by itself is useless unless you can trust the people on the other end.
Perhaps your generator won’t start. A voice on the radio sounds like a mechanic and claims you need a new spark plug. He can offer you one if you can meet him in a neighborhood 3 minutes from your house. Is this a benevolent actor with small engine expertise and a garage full of spare parts? A well meaning elderly man with dementia? An opportunist luring you into a robbery?
You lose a tremendous tactical advantage in this situation if you’ve never met any local radio operators, gotten a sense of where they live and what they do for a living. Some are skilled experts. Some are blowhards who confidently give bad advice. Some live near you. Some are 100 miles away. You can figure it out, but it takes time that you don’t have in the middle of a disaster.
Get your license. Join your local Amateur Radio Club. Use your radio to chat with someone at least once a week. If you have signal quality issues, experiment with upgrading your equipment. Then the radio in your bug out bag will be of some value to you.
Human networks can be stronger than radio waves, join your local radio club.
This fact alone is incredibly important to at the very minimum known what the heck is going on. Suddenly you have a cheap device in your hands that can receive updates relevant to survivors and victims.
In Portugal exist the 3-3-3 plans for anyone to practice using a radio. These are regular-weekly sessions with a lot of people joining.
In most countries emergency services have moved over to tetra or dmr, with encryption, and all the public related info is broadcasted on "normal" broadcast fm, where you need a normal fm radio, not a ham transciever.
* I have a Starlink mini--in the event that there is ever a broadly disconnecting event I'd be happy to share access to it. I keep it pretty much exclusively for emergency use and occasional camping/rural holiday house vacations. You might want to consider one too? They're ~250 euros new, which for someone who's starting a club for anything seems like a plausible expense. I believe there's a chinese version in case you don't want to trust the whims and emotions of Musk. * https://kiwix.org/en/applications/ is pretty useful if you'd like to have an archive of technical information, wikipedia, stack exchange etc.
* I try and keep whatever feels like the smartest open weight LLMs at the time available so if something real bad ever happened it'd still be available. I might add that idea to your preparedness list too--I'd probably take LM Studio with Gemma 3 over another random engineer on the Meshtastic channel :)
* Would you share channel config details for your IRC community? I'm happy to join.
> Note: Currently, LR1110 radios are unable to receive Meshtastic packets from the older SX127x radios, it requires a breaking change to fix this. Transmitting works and when hopping through an SX126x radio, you can still receive packets from SX127x radios.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/seeed-studio/se...
Its range is also much worse than the T-Echo's.
> You have the ability to pause and unpause service at any time, with billing occurring monthly.
Source: https://www.starlink.com/support/article/dd5b43b5-20e1-b29b-...
> If you exceed the allotted data on the Roam 50GB plan and have not opted-in for additional data, you will be unable to use the internet except to access your Starlink account, from which you can add additional data or change plans.
2. In case of conflict, everyone who starts LoRa gets delivery of artillery shell/rocket on their position.
Just like in Ukraine, try to go there and start up stock firmware DJI drone there and see what happens :)
Same when using radios in UA, no.1 rule is to NOT use encrypted radios, I like this example the most, because it goes against common sense, why would you want to use unencrypted radios so enemies can see your whole communication.
Reason behind this is following, encrypted radio traffic is very interesting for enemy, so it means if someone using it, he must be someone important -> send shell, badabum.
But the wider point is generally that just because something is less effective doesn't make it useless, and just because something is effective doesn't make it dominating.
If an enemy has an artillery advantage, then shelling obvious decoys is still taking decoys off the field, which you now need to replace. But worse, their existence is giving away the fact you're active in the area, and their placement is giving away your operational range - i.e. how far can a person move on foot over rough terrain? How far in a vehicle? etc. What's the effective range of their normal infantry weapons - if you know there's a decoy then the trap has a specific radius if it is a trap.
All on the bet that they will in fact run out of shells - or in the case of drones, they won't even run out since a drone can much more easily be re-targeted.
Kiwix is the best software I have found for this and they make an extensive library of materials available for download themselves, which includes the aforementioned but also many other resources that would be helpful in a disaster scenario: https://library.kiwix.org/
The way I read this, it's more about what is needed to get services back up after a large scale loss of critical infrastructure: communication to other network/internet/infrastructure professionals.
Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a financial hit for my paranoia.
Maybe walkie talkies too? Pretty simple to use!
Are there use cases for this sort of thing that could make it worthwhile even if doomsday doesn't arrive?
also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need them
(It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we didn't have power outages).
If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.
The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building long-term resilience is much harder.
IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WRNTkbRuCI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHB_5Z_CFE
Pros: - it can actually scale past 20 devices - Forward secrecy encryption - Is designed to support multiple underlying transport systems such as TCP or LoRa - Announce based routing rather than flooding the entire network which is order of magnitudes faster Cons: - Not as many nodes as Meshtastic has - Python implementation with no C implementation (can be speed up with cython however)
Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
Anyway, it's a nice hobby to learn a lot about solar powered systems and antennas/propagation.
I think that one of the best use cases for Meshtastic is to use it during protests, especially in authoritarian countries.
For protest there are already bluetooth messenger for that:
https://briarproject.org
but yeah it is only for Android.
At present there simply exist no good BLE messengers any more since recent updates to the BLE stack.
There is also a version with Rak chip instead that ESP32, that is a lot less power hungry and it's perfect for a solar powered module.
(but I get this is geared towards communication resilience)
Then, there is JS8Call, PSK, SSB, FM, etc
This WiFi offers a low-data-rate (<5-10 mbit/s) service to seniors for free or a very low fee (~3€/month), without service guarantees, but honest best-effort.
In the case when an internet problem arises, which affects the city's it-infrastructure, the city can switch to this WiFi to have their city-wide services still interconnected, while the seniors get kicked off of the network during this time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/
At most you will only be able to start a few Android-phone hotpspots and share files. That is the reality of it.
At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router running only on solar? Very seldom.
It will not be a problem at all to power it completely on a small 100W panel.
Is this scalable?
so many wrong assumptions on that article.
However I don't think these cases are anywhere close to the level of widespread disruption that the list of dangers can bring.
Do you happen to know instances where mass hysteria had a similar effect on disrupting global supply chains or communication services than war, geopolitics etc?
It is until it isn't. Better not to write off these dangers and to just focus on keeping the general public in the dark to avoid mass hysteria, and treat these other threats with the required respect they deserve just in case.
The implication is "There's no need to worry about CO2 at this point, it's already done the damage it can, so let's call our global warming concerns off". But the models may be suspect (see my other post), so I wouldn't go celebrate just yet. Let's at least wait for peer review or submission to a notable journal to see how well received it is.
About these calculations there's interesting material out there. I think there's even software to download, and feed with a download of HITRAN-Data.
Germany has the potential to go full Nazi again... And the population is mostly crazy in a scary way "We need sirens", "We need bunkers", "How can I make my pupils go for a career in the army"...
Instead of of investing time into making a mesh network. I'd like to see more energy spent on preventing real dangers. If people don't start going against the real troublemakers, loss of internet will be very low on the list of problems of the future.
And still nobody I've ever seen in public speak or comment about climate has ever read any paper on atmosphere physics... Before you build a mesh network against climate change, people should better read at least a few papers about atmosphere physics first.
Starlink is much simpler for the average consumer to setup than what this article suggests.
Resiliency isn't found by relying on corporations who are subject to interference by foreign nations.
A mesh network and federated services will not rely on one actor or server. And if you are in middle of no where and only a random guy from Texas is hosting, then maybe start your own node if he is unreliable.
Please don't confuse security with resilience, they might be connected in some dots but have fundamentally different purposes.