It's a peer to peer network based on Lora. It really only allows text messaging but with up to 20km hops between peers coverage is surprisingly huge. Incredibly useful if you go hiking with friends (if you get split up you can still stay in touch).
See https://eastmesh.au/ and scroll down to the map for the Victoria and now more widely Australia network that's sprung up.
I’ve deployed lots of nodes, and the technology reminds me of ipfs: people who don’t use it much vastly oversell its capabilities.
I just tested the other day. I'm in the midwest US so it's winter, no leaves. I managed to get about a quarter mile before my two portable nodes couldn't talk to each other. T-Echo with muziworks whip antenna.
Without a bunch of solidly placed, high elevation, high gain antenna nodes, this just isn't really that usable.
Plus, all the other issues others have highlighted.
I couldn't get ANYTHING on my first/test ESP32 (Heltec v2).
Anything. I didn't see any packets. Then I finally heard one station later when I held it high on the upper floor.
The I hanged it at the top of my roof and I currently have almost 130 repeaters and room servers.
In your scenario a couple of 5W handhelds woukd work better.
But I agree the usabity is very limited. This is why I think of hanging a couple of guerilla solar repeaters in my neighborhood :)
Exactly, in nearly every “off-grid”/no cell service scenario where I’ve needed comms, the GMRS radios > Lora.
Its an interesting idea but I can’t go site prep 100s of miles of snowmobile trail before I go just to be able to send a text to someone a mile away.
:)
Both projects are hitting their limits because of this. Every new feature and every bug fix causes endless amount of pain and breakage.
I was involved in both - and gave up because of this.
IMHO both projects need some kind of thin-client which delegates most of the functionality into the client. Only keep some basic LoRa/Message Buffer/Routing/Battery Saving functionality in the hardware itself.
The fundamental problem of distributed networks is that you can either have centralized control of the endpoints, or your network becomes vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. So meshcore/meshtastic are great because they are used only by well-meaning people. If they become more popular, we'll start getting tons of spam :(
For one, meshcore doesn't do a fantastic job of protecting metadata. Advertisements include your public key, and if I'm reading this[0] right, your GPS coordinates.
Second, the default public channel uses effectively no encryption at all.
Moreover, the network doesn't exhaustively prevent someone who intercepts a packet from identifying who sent it. It's no Signal.
[0] https://deepwiki.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/7.1-packet-struct...
The PKI is basic because these networks are tiny and merging. And running on tiny computers ($5 boards with no display)
Public channel is public and it uses the default encryption key because it's a default channel, so by definition everyone is invited to participate. Not sure what your critique is.
And no, it's not trying to be signal. It's also currently less reliable.
But it's still safer than Sms, by a country mile.
1. Telling someone to use one of these devices because their phone carrier might look up their location is silly in the first place, because meshcore doesn't even eliminate the possibility of being tracked geographically.
2. It protects your messages better than SMS but if you care about the privacy of your messages, it's infinitely worse advice than suggesting someone use Signal or another app that actually replaces SMS securely.
Handheld radios, meshtatic (not meshcore), and in 5 minutes you're set up and good to depart. Or ideally inreach indeed.
Based on the very “bursty” nature of LoRA, how much does an adversary need to spend to radiolocate it? What’s the threat model there?
Note: did things in .mil