Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
bowshock.nl
bowshock.nl
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!
The android client .apk can be downloaded directly from github at https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android/releases
I do agree though, I feel there should be more effort to support "long term lack of internet" use case.
As an example, Hundred Rabbits is living in a situation with extremely iffy internet. They live on a sailbot and work in computing out there. They have had to build their own tools that were not dependent on a reliable internet, or even reliable power sources.
- https://100r.co/site/tools_ecosystem.html
- https://100r.co/site/off_the_grid.html#internet
Collapse OS and Dusk OS are projects that are building tools to mitigate against the risk of society collapse. These are scenarios where, not only is there no internet, there is no longer any capability to fabricate any more silicon chips, and people start scavenging existing systems.
- You can use Meshtastic CLI.
- Docs are in git repository in .mdx format: https://github.com/meshtastic/meshtastic
All "sins" you mentioned are results of trying to be more convenient for users used to web browsers. Current state of web is pretty far from being decentralized, including web3.
Look at Linux. In the last decade there's been a huge boon and tbh, the biggest part of that is usability. UI/UX got a lot nicer and cleaner. I mean another part is Microsoft and Apple getting more hostile and people looking for alternatives, but usability is what provided those people space and a larger more diverse community is what made it more approachable.
What I'm saying is, keep up the criticism but let's also make sure to interpret it as feedback rather than pure complaint. So we can turn these things into what they can be. After all, this is the place where we make great products, right?
And never underestimate the criticality of documentation. It seems burdensome and annoying since it is always changing, but you can't get people to join your cause if they don't know how to. In your company or your OSS project. It's a very profitable investment
The web app seems to work fine offline. Save the page with your browser.
Android app is available pre-built on github.
iOS app can't be distributed to end users offline because of Apple. Blame them or buy a better phone.
Which btw is a rather trivial thing to implement. I've seen devices host a control webserver with Ethernet-over-USB just for convenience.
I was very disappointed to find that the “local-first” manifesto was not the “local-first” as I understood it. In my mind, I should be able to connect an app on my phone to another phone via bluetooth, and sync without going through a central server. However, it makes very little economic sense, if someone is building a SAAS product that locks customers into dependencies on a central server where services can be metered and billed. To my mind, those are “offline-first”.
I have thought about what it would take to build a local-first software forge and package distribution, and yet, I couldn’t see a good reason to expend that effort. We have a lot of the pieces … with this example — if we want to be able to expand a meshtastic network _after_ a disaster, then the whole tooling, development, etc. needs to be local-first and resilient.
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
Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.
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
Australia has the highest density of residential rooftop solar in the world, making up about 11% of the grid supply. Feed-in tariffs are standard there.
Anecdotally, amongst my social circle, people are buying house batteries because the feedin tariffs are so low it's worthwhile spending $10k or so to store your daytime solar for use in evenings/night - because it costs 40 or 60c per kWHr to buy electricity off the grid in the evening, and they only give you a cent or two to if you feed it on during midday solar peaks. It's way better value to charge your house battery (and you car if you can) than to sell solar generated electricity back to the grid.
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.
The grid going down is game over. Once you’re at this point, there are already people going hurt. The way inverters react to this is irrelevant.
The thing making home setups not a source energy utilities would want to pay much for is that they bring no service to the grid (frequency and voltage management, ability to be turned off when the grid manager wants, reactive production management).
The part where people get hurt is that in overproduction events, the grid manager has no way to cut that production or even single homes, so they sometimes have to cut whole neighborhoods. That did happen already, even if it’s not a common thing.
Interestingly DECT NR+ is a 5G standard on dedicated spectrum and has been designed to be a mesh from the start.
My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding noise, and so local messaging out to 80km or so tends to be pretty reliable. The same would be absolutely impossible with wifi.
That’s with 80 or so local nodes on LONG_FAST, population of around half a million.
Thats said, Meshtastic’s routing algorithm is extremely inefficient and has huge room for improvement.
What does this mean exactly and how does it address GP's concerns?
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...
I've given more study to the latter, and I think it's the lack of store and forward reliable transmission. The messages goes out once and if it doesn't make it.. too bad so sad. The whole ecosystem strongly assuming you have internet access is also a real bummer.
If anyone is looking to improve it or develop a better alternative, I did help create a primitive you should consider using: https://github.com/sipa/minisketch
I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic
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.
To be fair, this is a real scenario for people in snowy/and or rural areas. It isn't uncommon for people in my area of Canada to get snowed in for a few days.
I doubt everything would be as idyllic as you describe if the blackout went for longer.
Hangover from the port.
Instead of doing drugs or chatting, I'd read a book on my Kobo.
The thing with the stuff you mentioned. I already drank enough alcohol jn my life to not bother with it anymore. Same with card games. And random chitchat.
We actually saw the effect of downtime during covid. In the beginning, a massive appreciation for health services. We all know how long that lasted. In the beginning, it was us against the virus. Eventually, we were fighting with each other, even over details. Rest assured, offensive propaganda services from secret agencies learned a lot from that (one may guess which one primarily).
If it was so awesome that wine drinking and chit-chat, why aren't we doing it? A pretty simple explanation is: because it ain't awesome. Yes, a change of pace can be regarded as a fun challenge or change of pace. Heck, it may even open up people to changing their life. But look how much we remote work post covid. Policies were reverted.
It seems to me that these modern anti-social tendencies are actively driving a wedge between most people and their surroundings, making people further isolated from each other. Young people tend to spend time in doors alone because they don't know _how_ to interact with strangers. But they should because being alone is literally damaging to your health.
Being far away from friends is bad for you[1]. Being socially isolated is bad for you. Promoting a lifestyle in which you don't have friends and don't talk to strangers is akin to promoting a lifestyle in which you don't exercise.
It's not "awesome", it's a necessary component of living healthily as a human being.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-factors/index.... - I found this source from the CDC but there are numerous others
That much anyone can figure, and my point is, that threshold of sustainable density can be way lower than commonly thought. We're just too used to it, like we're used to burning fossil fuel. There might be a "peak density", hopefully after population growth resumed on the high orbit and beyond.
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.
Ready.gov has instructions.
> Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase?
oh, c'mon.
Do you or any one person you know use several hundred gallons of gas over the course of a few days on critical things? If that is the case, then yes, by all means you should have a private gasoline backup supply since you are running some sort of industrial scale operation.
If you are worried about it, just make sure you have a several day supply of gasoline on hand. For most people that use about a tank of gas per week that means filling up when you are at half tank. For those of us, like me, who live in a place where a generator is occasionally useful, a couple of jerry cans full of gas are typically already on hand. Hundreds of gallons could keep me powered up for weeks at a minimum unless I was really trying to use a lot of power.
For most people, gasoline is used exclusively for their car, which has a multi-day gas supply storage mechanism built in.
Lets say we require all gas stations to have the ability to pump gas during a blackout. Then what? It doesn't solve any of your hypotheticals. Without a beefy generator and a professional crossover switch, you aren't powering your home with gasoline. What is a working gas station going to do for a renter, or apartment dweller?
In any case. If things get actually desperate, it isn't that hard for a handy person to wire a generator up on the spot, and get gas pumping, although at that point, what are the chances that the payment network is online. At that point you can just run the pump by hand if it's truly desperate.
> Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?
Not absurd at all. Experts and the government actually suggest that people do some of their own preparations for disasters. They suggest that you have enough on hand to survive for 48 hours without outside help. There are entire government initiatives, campaigns and organizations based on this exact premise. Check out Ready.gov for the USA federal version. You can probably find state and local level initiatives where you are too, if in the US. Almost every large, multi-day, regional blackout in living memory is weather related, which also means it is predictable.
It's hard for me to imagine gas station convenience stores doing enough volume for this to make any business sense.
The business model for a typical gas station is to bring people in with competitively priced gas, since people are incredibly price sensitive to gas, and then make money with high margin c-store items. Most of the things in a c-store have triple digit margins. That's why you'll see plenty of c-stores without gas stations, but its pretty rare to see a gas station that doesn't have a business attached.
While I can count on one hand the number of times I walk into the store at a gas station in a given year, I know others who buy things on a daily basis, to the point that they’re on a first name basis with everyone there and the employees start asking questions if a few days go buy without a visit.
When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel. The populace at large is never going to be prepared enough to deal with every gas station in the area going down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they won’t have any issues with the margins as they will simply all raise prices in concert.
It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.
A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.
Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.
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
Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".
Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few watts for my phone).
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.
Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.
I left that 'party' quite early.
Why did you cut out that part?
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.
It takes me about a month after a reinstall or new machine, to feel like I've really spread my wings and have everything installed that I initially forgot about. So I guess the recommendation would be "daily-drive it for a month before refrigerating it". And at that point, you might as well just make it your everyday machine.
Even if there were, it may be orthogonal to the anti-theft online Activation feature that wpm was talking about.
I had no idea. I guess this refers to app-store rules? Related to https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/applicat... and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preventin... ?
Or is it even hard to browse to http webpages? (No problem on iOS that I see.)
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.
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!)
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.
It’s not limited to LoRa—Reticulum works over IP, serial, packet radio, or whatever you have. Delay-tolerant, multi-hop, encrypted, no servers needed. Still lots of work to do and apps to build, but the foundation is solid.
Great talk from EH22: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking
404s for me. This[1] perhaps? Note trailing hyphen.
[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking-
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.
But yeah, my vision is pretty much just SSB all grown up.
(Go sign up to eternal-september.org if you're interested)
The tricky part there would be working out a partition tolerant payments system. It's one thing to go offline in the middle of delivering a message, its another thing entirely to orchestrate payment across a smattering of disconnected networks (blockchains are not partition tolerant). I think it could be done, but that's an application layer concern... gotta get the peer finding and web-of-trust stuff working first.
The advantage of something that can reach 6 miles is that it could cover suburbia and rural areas with ~20-40 acre plots relatively effectively.
Really the thing I'm trying to push back against is the idea that the entire path between them must be connected all at once in order for two parties to communicate. If we design for short range, partition-tolerant, pocket-to-pocket background gossip, then that same protocol will work just fine if you attach specialty radio hardware and give it miles worth of range, and you've still got the fallback ready for cases where all you have is consumer grade hardware.
On the other hand, if you design for persistent connectivity and then try to use it in an intermittently-connected context, you're going to have a much worse time.
It might look something like this: As you stand in line at the grocery store your device notices that a nearby device (the guy behind you) belongs to somebody who is trusted by one of your peers in the "gardening" topic. You're not a gardener, but your room mate is. So your device pulls a gardening related update from their device. Then as you head home with groceries your device is not connected to anything, it's just sitting in your pocket with a filesystem full of data. And then when you get home your roommate's device gets a notification about a reply to their question on a gardening related message board. That data came to them on your device. It traveled a few feet wirelessly at the grocery store, and a few feet wirelessly at home, but the majority of the transit was handled the slow way, by hitching a ride on a human who was traveling that way anyhow.
It would only work for small bits of latency tolerant data, and work best for information of broad interest (not so great for an encrypted email to a single party, pretty good for map tiles, open/closed hours, restaurant menus, etc). The simplest app to build on such a platform would be a sort of of distributed BBS. VoIP would be nearly impossible. But I think that small snippets of high latency text can get you pretty far.
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.
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.
In either case, they are a good competitor.
Because it would likely violate the restrictions setup for the LoRa frequency. Using a normal walkie-talkie has none of those limitations while being cheaper and more versatile.
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.
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.
You’re not going to reliably get that without terrestrial infrastructure, unless both you and your correspondent are conveniently standing on mountaintops.
5km in the suburbs, maybe. Closer to 500m at street level in an urban environment.
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.
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.
* 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.
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)
Another nifty feature of a manually positioned laser is the automatic measurement of time domain. One could have an optional security feature to automatically disable the data-stream if the time domain of the laser changes in physical distance of more than {n} user-defined meters or centimeters to prevent MitM (Monster in the Middle) beam interception for the extra properly paranoid types.
There can be weather issues for laser but for that one could fall back to voice using any one of the hundreds of makes and models of HAM gear that can operate on and around 11 meters by moving a jumper or holding down two buttons when it is powered on. Illegal but only enforced by monthly example of someone impacting revenue generating sites. Voice changers and scramblers FTW. RF signature ignored. Don't use sloppy SDR's. In a grid down event TLA's will be busy with higher priority issues and will "look into it" eventually by which point the transceivers mysteriously vanish assuming one can even get the TLA to show up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
By requiring special hardware, and be it just some common router, or any sort of special technical skill, you are already excluding 99.99% of the world population...
You can run LoRa from a small power bank for days, or run it off of a small battery and solar panel indefinitely. Wifi is much more power hungry. Wifi also doesn't offer kilometres of range, making that power cost largely wasteful.
In an emergency, if you have limited power, WiFi will exclude 100% of the population simply because it's not practical to operate at all. LoRa, even if it enables 0.01% of the population (primarily experts in the technology) in that emergency, is a greater benefit to everyone at that time.
WiFi is a peace time technology based around a rich infrastructure that is not resilient in emergencies. If you skimmed the article you should check it out again. She details this stuff, and it's actually really interesting and worth understanding if you're into this stuff:
LoRa radios have several advantages for use in emergency communications:
no centralized infrastructure needed
no license needed
cheap (starting at ~€20)
low-power (< 1W, can power with an ordinary mobile phone powerbank)
runs open source Meshtastic firmware
can send text messages across several line-of-sight hops (several kms)
can connect via Bluetooth or WiFi to phones/computers
many urban areas have a good Meshtastic network alreadyhttps://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-ltu-5ghz/pro...
only 9W max power consumption too! well, that's not a few hundred milliwatts, still, better then ye olde lightbulb
PLUS gigabit throughput
if only our network stacks and protocols didn't assume hierarchical (local) networks by default, and kernels included p2p network stacks, then i'd feel more confident about blackouts being handled more gracefully
well, i suppose all this depends heavily on the nature of the emergency
generally i'm surprised that the sheer computational power of modern smartphones are not used more for this purpose, i haven't come across much true p2p software
on another note, there is still no (truly) cross-platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop standard (especially one without artificial limitations), which is a shame
also i want to note that smartphones can even communicate directly with satellites now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
Satellites could be an important component here, but there's always the need for redundancy. They can be compromised too, and you don't own them.
The LTU Extreme Range hardware is way, way more expensive than a LoRa radio, and it still uses quite a bit of power (relatively). It still seems far from ideal in situations where you can't depend on power utilities. Great point though, I wasn't aware that exists. It appears you need the one you linked as well as the Rocket as its base station, which puts it close to $800 CAD after taxes.
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)
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.
Maybe walkie talkies too? Pretty simple to use!
Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a financial hit for my paranoia.
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
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.
(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).
Are there use cases for this sort of thing that could make it worthwhile even if doomsday doesn't arrive?
Beg to disagree here. 30 dollars for a cheap-ass Quansheng will get you pretty far as long as a repeater is in reach (if it's Echolink capable, worldwide), and a bunch of repeaters for all kinds of modes are tied together not only via the Internet but also via AMPR / HamNet [1]. APRS and DMR capable devices are in the 200 dollar range.
For high bandwidth data communication it becomes a bit more involved - Ubiquiti hardware for example can be trivially software-modified to transmit on the amateur radio ranges, which is how that gear ends up powering a lot of HamNet stations. Sadly, unless there's a HamNet node on a nearby large structure you'll probably need to raise a tower large enough to achieve line-of-sight to the nearest HamNet node.
For people in reach of the QO-100 satellite (i.e. Europe, Africa, about half of Asia), there have been experiments to use that satellite not just as a repeater for voice and video, but also data [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
[2] https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-ip...
Designing a system to decide when to keep something is tricky. Maybe each visit and each click should extend the expiration date and increase the storage for static documents. Say, 10 visits should be enough to buy 1 mb of permanent storage to be spend on however many pages it takes starting with the frequently visited pages then a manifest or the order of links on the front page then the first from each sub page etc
It should also be possible to have the browser manage updates rather than every man for himself with each website testing the connection, checking for updates and stitching things back together again. There are quite a few schemes it could follow, smaller requests would require more complicated backends. Different pages with different update frequencies.
I think the single star bookmark button could have 1-5 stars with 5 assigning somewhat generous data to the website and 3+ allowing a prompt for very large things.
Then, since I'm serving static content anyway I really couldn't care less how the user obtains the files. If there is a copy of the website on a network all you need is a public key or to trust the user (at the price of annoying prompts warning you on every page view and every request)
If it all works well enough HN could be a tiny website managing only active discussions. If you have the key and a working connection to some other users most of the archive could be there. The catching priority could change to the rarest pages.
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:
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.
I really love the idea its the proposal itself I find odd. "Internety people" isnt really a well defined list of stakeholders. And I am struggling to figure out what outages could be handled by a group of undefined meshtastic users, especially with the overall tone that warfare might be involved.
Really the work of network resilience begins before the bombs drop. And its basic stuff. Keep everything patched. Keep your physical infrastructure secure. Ensure your data is safe, and you implement security best practices. And thats a list of things that largely we know that ISP's dont do.
Once thats done, every netadmin needs reliable OOB access to their networks. Now, OOB access might cease to function in this scenario. In which case, you are looking at ensuring that you have reliable physical access to your network. If you need cell service to communicate with your OOB solution, and it fails, dont also rely on cellular access to hands on techs. I dont know if Meshtastic is a useful solution here either, but having pre drilled emergency response plans so that qualified staff show up to the right locations for briefings/network access are crucial. Generators within reach of technicians, you might not be able to buy a generator during an incident. Console cables and tools already distributed.
Of course this all costs money.
Ultimately if you have no power, your peers dont have power, and theres an unspecified amount of physical damage (like a datacenter getting bombed) theres not going to be much you can do on a timescale that makes meshtastic make sense.
If anything theres probably some room for a government solution. Propose a hardened communications channel for private sector network engineers. Make sure that access to government infrastructure comes with a requirement that you actually patch and secure your network. Begin any large scale internet infrastructure collapse by getting a list of available engineers and resources and working out the compensation later.
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.
It's clear they didn't research any historical mesh network schemes (ALOHAnet [0] and other MANETs [1]) when writing it. And flood routing more or less kinda worked, but as it go popular, it stopped working reliably. There's a video from Jeff Geerling about it and he was generous I think when he called Meshtastic "Beta" [4].
Meshtastic a few years ago released a youtube video describing how it worked, and there wasn't anything about topology resolution, it was pretty much about signal strength and device type [2].
This caused an issue because anyone could create a router. And often they did. And when they did, this could break routing because the router is in the other direction of where the originator wanted the traffic could go.
They also prioritized letting the edges forward the message on. AFAICT they could only detect this by signal strength. So a badly performing node (bad antenna or maybe a node turned on in a basement) could get priority.
The last issue is congestion. Nodes can send telemetry, often rather quickly, but that could get flooded on the network. And with a hop count max of 7, it often will go where it's not wanted, wasting the network bandwidth -- as nobody really cares about one particular node's battery life.
So in a dense Meshtastic metro (I can see multiple sites) I couldn't reliably get a message to a friend in the same city. The lesson is that the hardware is better than the software at this point. And there's no use using it until they fix their software. [3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU
[3] I did some research on meshtastic and after finding and watching [2] I gave up on meshtastic, because it's clear that weren't super serious on routing algorithms, nor basic wikipedia reading. Version 2.6 maybe better, but there's a slew of nodes on 2.4 yet. And I don't want to bother with it anymore -- at least until they fix their reliability problems.
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.
(but I get this is geared towards communication resilience)
Then, there is JS8Call, PSK, SSB, FM, etc
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.
You can even use a (right-sized) lead-acid battery without a charge controller, as they're pretty resilient, unlike lithium-based batteries. This will both store power for night and stabilize the voltage. The lifetime would be a bit shorter. You can literally just parallel your solar panel, battery, and whatever you want to power, and it has a pretty good chance of working.
Try to avoid understanding this difficulty from your own shoes, but rather from the shoes of communities very limited on what is reachable to them from a technical, financial and logistical point of view.
I know you can solve it easily. I can solve it even more easily myself.
Now see any disaster area, see any remote area. Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations. Even as things settle, it is still more practical to share files directly with each other.
When you see from that perspective then you are on the domain of realistic solutions rather than keyboard level on virtual forum.
The point here is to have it setup before the proverbial shit hits the fan.
Resiliency preparations are a fundamentally different ballgame to disaster recovery - you have more time and resources to prepare, your supply chains aren't broken yet, etc.
Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
so many wrong assumptions on that article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/
Is this scalable?
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.