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Comment by bjconlan | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this has been my experience too. Generally you use the frequency that has been legalised for use in the region you operate it in. I wonder if this automatically switches to the suitable frequency based off coordinates (when using a gps’d board) I’m sure it would be trivial to implement. Ah good ole opensource. This really is a great solution, riding around New Zealand the only solution is a SPOT tracker which charges like a wounded bull so I love that this is disrupting this space (and using clever tech - heck might throw one of these on the moto just to use it for security)

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For Meshtastic, you upload a country/frequency specific firmware.

It’s perfectly happy running on devices without gps, so it’d be a maybe nice to have but not a thing the project could rely on to meet regulatory frequency compliance.

For your motorcycle use case, keep in mind this is a small group of people mesh thing, not something where one device can expect to connect to unknown other people. The SPOT tracker is still the solution you want if you’re looking for safety/emergency contact.

What meshtastic might be useful for on motorcycles (and I’m considering building some of these) is a medium range mesh network between you and your riding group, with super simple super limited Comms UI. I’m thinking 3 or 4 different colour old school video game type buttons that you can mash wearing gloves, that light up a bright-enough rgb led to see in the sun, with 3 or 4 agreed meanings for the colours. “Pull over and check messages”, “Wait for me”, “I’ve crashed”, “Cops!” type messages, that can be sent/understood without needing to read a text message on a phone screen (but still having that text messaging available as well).

> keep in mind this is a small group of people mesh thing, not something where one device can expect to connect to unknown other people.

I'm curious why you say this. Can a network not support, say, 500 nodes? 5000?

Also, (for a smaller-group use case obviously), is voice over the network completely out of the question?

The low bandwidth and the mesh topology put a hard upper limit on the number of nodes in a channel. From memory its limited to 250 nodes in the default settings.

https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/theoretical-mesh-stats/...

"I suspect up to about 30 nodes per channel would be fine, I bet the channel will be almost unusable once you reach 100 nodes."

As for voice - I think in default "very long range mode" the mesh bandwidth is down around 20 bytes per second. It's possible to get higher bandwidth at the expense of range, but it's really not what you're looking for if you want voice comms.

Presumably this is all using one channel as well, so scalability will be limited by the amount of airtime per device.

I suppose you could send voice very slowly at very high latency if you wanted to... but it would not be very efficient.

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