Only very very small testbeds.
Only very very small testbeds.
It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
Is there still a reason to do this?
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/wiki/Community-Node-L...
takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.
So you basically eliminate futzing around with the hard parts until you understand the reticulum network itself.
Basically work your way down the OSI model instead of working your way up it.
They have a decent range (15 miles or more) so depending on how rural you are, you might be able to create a line of repeaters back to a major population center.
Your point still stands though.
Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
Why not anymore? I know meshtastic has dumb routing but I thought Meshcore was much better.
I think things like this are at high risk of having perfect be the enemy of good, but I’m not exactly in my comfort zone technically.
I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.
1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.
2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.
3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".
FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.
For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.
If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.
I was getting very good signals with this one [1].
I'm sorry but are you serious? That map shows 224 nodes in the world, fewer than 30 in the entire Western hemisphere. And only 24 in the world are using LoRa? Meshcore has 38,000 nodes, Meshtastic 10,000. Those two projects can actually be said to have "tons" of nodes.
It hurts your credibility. I trusted you, spent time trying to debug the map, thinking that something was wrong on my end... why am I only seeing 224 when there should be "tons", is there a filter, are these just super nodes....
So I looked into it because of what you said, but you raised expectations so much that I feel nothing but disappointment.
I was referring to the TCP/IP, I2P and yggdrasil endpoints. And regardless, "tons" was an unnecessary exaggeration.
based upon the announce stream coming through my local node, i am seeing around 14k unique identities advertising over 21k unique application endpoints (destinations) over the course of the past month or so that i’ve been tracking it.