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Comment by killingtime74 | Hacker News Reader

If there is really a civil war, won't these frequencies just get jammed?

The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force. This is the sort of nihilism that stops us from meaningful change, because we destroy ourselves in either sloth or despair.

Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.

Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.

Meshtastic works on commercial frequencies. If they block those then a good number of non-wifi/bluetooth devices will just stop working.

Including, but not limited to: garage door openers, some (older) car key fobs, some RC equipment, wireless weather sensors, remotely readable metering devices (electricity, water) and a crapton of other things.

You could just flood Meshtastic channel with valid traffic specifically

Then people's garages would start randomly opening? =)

All Semtech LoRa modems are wide-range modems. You can switch to basically every other frequency.

An idea would be to move to SX128x modems with work around 2.4GHz. You recycle Wifi-gear for directional stuff. This also enabled you to hide below Wifi traffic.

Still jammable - but much much more difficult.

Nah. The citywide meshtastic grids that exist presently operate on one single frequency citywide.

If you shut off the internet and jam that frequency, nobody can talk to anyone else to coordinate about a new frequency (which is then also just trivially jammed).

And then every single other device on that frequency is also useless

Is the pain of that worth disabling communication?

Jamming is a double-edged sword, there are common frequency bands used by everyones equipment like 2.4GHz, 5GHz or the ISM band. If you jam those indiscriminately, your own stuff stops working as well.

Any actual adversarial situation is a constant back and forth of "This works, whoops now it's countered, well now we countered that" forever.

Things don't stand still in "war". There's no "Solution" that will not be attacked, and there's no attack that cannot be worked around.

The US is huge — you can’t jam everything everywhere. Talking about just cities, you still can’t jam everything everywhere.

But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.

This reminds me the way the software was distributed in eastern countries when there was no internet. People went to market to meet other people, and they were peddling/colporting (look up the term in French) cassettes with the software.

The same can happen now - people would walk down the streets to certain places, to become hubs of information, but with no physical contact. Of course those places would be were the jammers would head to.

Actually this sounds like a good theme for book... however as long as I live on this world, I've noticed that if I invent something, there are already two people on the internet who have invented it already, so... please give me the title :)

To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"

"Colporter" is not an especially fancy word, it just means "to peddle" in English.

And for anything you really need to keep hidden, there's always culportage.

> look up the term in French

Wasn't that also called SneakerNet, back in the time? We used it in western Europe as well (both term and distribution method)

Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.

Why would anti-fascists jam EMS frequencies?

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