Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band | Hacker News Reader

Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band

meshtastic.org

89 pointsgeerlingguy16 comments

LoRa WAN user here, not to get confused with Ai LoRA.

LoRa has been a game-changer for IoT devices on the 900mHz spectrum. Chirping allows LoRa to go extremely great distances for free!

Overall, the 900mHz band is for hobbyists. I’m grateful that Meshtastic is stepping up regarding this matter although they’re not the sole beneficiary.

The FCC should not take this away from the public. 900mHz works through non-line-of-sight applications sufficiently well and anything above frequency will require higher power to generate an equivalent signal. High frequencies are not ideal for low data rate projects.

Can confirm by extensive 464, 900 MHz, and 2.4 GHz radio field testing of products and test equipment for WAAS-like GPS data updates conducted c. 2000. 2.4+ GHz just doesn't play well with building materials, while 900 MHz provides the right balance of bandwidth and attenuation.

PS: It's not millihertz (mHz), it's megahertz (MHz).

As I understand it, the proceeding is here, for those who wish to submit comments:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/RM-11989

Please correct me if I'm mistaken here, the question I couldn't find answered in the article is what I could do to help.

I hope this is like net neutrality and they get overrun with outcry.

Submitted a 10 page opposition complete with citations. Thanks for the help ChatGPT.

Been running a Meshtastic node for awhile now. Really amazing piece of kit. I regularly make 2 mile distant contacts in an urban area with an indoor antenna. Soon I hope to be able to have an exterior mounted one.

Hope they're able to protect their bandwidth

It's a lot about height + antenna selection. I've had better luck with Rak stuff than the more popular and super cheap Heltec V3 (but the V3 is a great little gateway into Meshtastic, and isn't too bad in certain areas).

I feel like Meshtastic is a lot like what ham radio felt like 50ish years ago. People experimenting with antennas and radios... dealing with the FCC and band allocations...

I do find there's proportionately more "prepper" types on the mesh, at least here in the Midwest, than I encounter online. Makes sense, though, considering how a lot of it is described.

Antenna selection is less important with LoRa than other mesh networks, which is nice meaning you can have a meshtastic watch for example.

The link budget is massive (150 dB) meaning getting a really nice antenna is less impactful than bumping your speed down a notch

Edit: LilyGo devices for 900MHz are notoriously terrible, and getting a $3 one will see a definite improvement

I've got a mix of LilyGo and Rak devices, and a sew Station G1's. LilyGo gets criticized, but after I switched to Rak antennas on them they work great.

The meshtastic discord definitely leans pepper as well. I live in a coastal urban area and the nodes here seem to be more general hobbyist.

I'm hoping to have some sort of automated BBS type node to play around with

Gosh, this is almost a replay of LightSquared (Ligado) and the GPS band/guard-bands - one has to consider the public good.

FWIW - Ligado and NextNav - yes, Reston, VA - must be something in the water

900MHz is an unlicensed band, so as long as folks play by the rules, it's fair game. If you look inside that band, there's a lot of different air interfaces running in there already - it's not just LORA.

NextNav, perhaps, wants to deploy a solution that uses those frequencies, and they're ok to do that, as long as they follow the rules.

Meshtastic - well, their business is to sell devices into that band - simply put, so any interference may impact their business.

There's other tech that runs in 900 - Z-Wave for example, which is used extensively with the Home/Commerical Security industry for sensors to base - also we have 802.11ah (WiFi-HaLow).

My position here is don't make any changes - as long as folks follow the rules for that band, you're good to go - If NextNav's tech cannot work within the rules, well, time to find another band...

FYI Meshtastic doesn't exist to make money, the software is open source[0] and the corporation sells nothing, it's a truly "for the community/public" project.

[0] https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/repositories

"NextNav is proposing to reconfigure the lower 900 MHz band by creating a 5-MHz uplink in the 902-907 MHz band paired with a 10-MHz downlink in the 918-928 MHz band"

Considering the 900mhz unlicensed band allocation is only from 902-928mhz, this would mean that NextNav leaves <11mhz (907-918) for the rest of us? Like, really though? There's VERY little in the radio spectrum that is left for unlicensed use.

From [0]: "However, much of this band is underutilized due to a legacy band plan and rules. Reconfiguring the band would pave the way for terrestrial PNT services as a complement and backup to GPS. It also would open 15 MHz of low-band spectrum for 5G broadband."

I mean.. are we having problems with 5G or GPS currently that requires taking even more spectrum allocation from the public? Did I miss the news about a major shortage of spectrum allocated to strictly commercial/licensed purposes?

[0] https://nextnav.com/fcc-public-notice-august-2024/

they also mention that it will help if gps signals are blocked..... if an entity will block gps, they will also block 900Mhz. It's nonsense.

Bit off-topic but is Jeff Geerling posting this on HN? I love your videos but didn’t think you were an HN-er.

Yep! Been here many years, between HN and Hackaday I probably find half the projects I work on.

My only question is why was this going unlicensed with the FCC? I don't think that's the impression most users had of this.

RAIN UHF RFID (which is in use in businesses everywhere) is also affected.....

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