GoTenna – Send and receive messages even when you don’t have service | Hacker News Reader

GoTenna – Send and receive messages even when you don’t have service

static.gotenna.com

255 pointschrisBob178 comments

A consumer-friendly, open version of amateur radio's APRS network would be really cool. This seems like the first step, though I don't know if they intend to open the protocol.

Also, 50 mile range sounds great, but that's under "ideal" conditions, which happens roughly never. I'm curious what the range would be in the real world.

> 50 mile range sounds great, but that's under "ideal" conditions, which happens roughly never. I'm curious what the range would be in the real world.

In that graphic, change the elevation to 6ft and you get much more realistic ranges. The default elevation is 500ft (top of a small hill).

I'm a HAM operator, that device's frequency is just a bit above our very popular 2m band. The ranges they indicate at more realistic elevations sound about right for me, for a data connection at 2W.

Weren't police bands (previously) right about there? My license lapsed a few years back, but if memory serves, some people would do some minor surgery on their 2m radios so they could tune in to police bands just above 2m. I assume police all use some fancy digital microwave comms now.

"some people would do some minor surgery on their 2m radios so they could tune in to police bands just above 2m"

Probably, but you could also just buy a police scanner from Radio Shack, or even a $10 TV tuner that can be used as an SDR: http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr

In fact I think those cheap Boafeng radios will even transmit on those frequencies. Of course that would be highly illegal.

"fancy digital microwave comms now"

Microwave radios are only really used for point-to-point links, as the shorter wavelengths require line-of-sight.

They are using digital trunking systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunked_radio_system), and encryption in some cases.

My Yaesu FT-817 transceiver has continuous, gapless tuning from the bottom of long-wave radio to the top of UHF - at least on the receiving side.

I'm pretty sure there's a simple hack to also make it transmit on any arbitrary frequency - but that's illegal, of course.

http://www.yaesu.com/indexVS.cfm?cmd=DisplayProducts&ProdCat...

>This seems like the first step

The first step would be a (multi?)-billion dollar spectrum purchase, I would think.

Interesting ... does this do any kind of store and forward or relaying? Say I send a message to a friend who happens to be out of range, but there was another GoTenna user who neither of us know, but who is in range of us both, will it relay the message via this 3rd party (encrypted) or is it purely a direct connection between sender --> receiver?

from the fAQs i gather that it sends from one gotenna to one or more recipient gotennas only: "Your smartphone will send the message to your goTenna, which will then shoot it out, via long-range radio waves, to the intended goTenna(s). At the other end, the exact same thing happens, in reverse: the recipient goTenna sends your message over BTLE to the smartphone app its paired with."

https://gotenna.myshopify.com/pages/faqs

building an ad-hoc network with these things would be kind of cool though. DIY city networks anyone...

goTenna is an ad hoc reconfigurable network in that you can create your own network (1:1; groups, 1:all; all:1) but we can't currently mesh due to FCC regulations. So we went with long-range instead, since meshing is most useful in dense, short-range situations. We're on it though... ;)

This could be earth changingly huge if you open source your designs and make one with wifi/ethernet. Store and forward push to talk messages.

You could charge for access to internet side of the store and forward system. Maybe attach cryptocurrency to the messages to pay for routing across the POPs.

Are you using the TI chips?

The platform possibilities are endless. Our dev kits will be ready soon: http://bit.ly/1oRwBkI

For now the chances of finding a third GoTenna user is quite low. In the future though this could be an alternative private Internet. A BitTorrent client could be a hit.

I think you are over estimating the bandwidth involved. They don't state much about the wireless protocol, but I am betting you don't want to send much more than a text message to get that range.

> via long-range radio waves

Which means that, no, they probably can't do seriously large amounts of data, but a picture (and definitely texting) can be sent through radio waves without much data retention issues.

goTenna's transmission rate goes up to 19,200 baud

Have you heard of https://projectmeshnet.org/ ?

As I understand it (I am in the outer gotenna circle) it will do some sort of store and forward mesh network-y thing.

Not at these frequencies. It's prohibited by the FCC. See some explanations from an insider above.

We want to do that, but FCC regulations don't enable meshing (currently) on the bands we're using (151-154 MHz, aka the MURS band). We considered releasing a 900 MHz device that the FCC allows to mesh but then you only get, if you're lucky, up to 0.5 km range and it has to be line-of-sight. So we went with MURS because you can get greater range and don't have to be line-of-sight; the propagation characteristics are better down at MURS. Also, when we asked 1000 people (including testers) what they preferred -- a long-range MURS device or a short-range meshing device -- about 8 of 10 picked the former. So that's why the goTenna device you see today is our first release!

How often are you getting non-line-of-sight propagation with MURS?

Most of the time. We live in NYC and have gotten anywhere from 0.5 mile to 3.5 miles range here, depending what part of the city you're in. There's nearly no such thing as LOS in a city unless, say, you're in a skyscraper ;)

Ah, I'm just surprised that buildings ended up mattering when you were deciding between 150MHz or 900MHz.

While people like to complain about the frequency getting higher and propagation dropping off (especially related to 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi), I haven't found a good paper that guarantees that's the case. Anecdotally, I can receive a 5GHz signal in my office in Manhattan from a radar in Floyd Bennett Field, 12 miles away, with buildings in the way. Similarly, inside my apartment, I have much better luck with 440MHz radio communication than 144MHz communication. (Ground floor, so not that great either way.)

Being limited to 4W EIRP in the 900MHz ISM band probably played more of a role?

Anyway, you might want to find these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7981431

The combination of your product with their technology could be quite interesting.

Also, follow up question: does your protocol attempt to recover signals from below the noise floor?

No on the noise floor question ;)

Would it be possible to build a software-level mesh on top of these devices even though they don't officially support meshing? In other words, could someone build an iPhone app that implements some sort of decentralized DNS and routes messages, even though the hardware can't do that on it's own?

CFR 2009 § 95.1311

  MURS stations are prohibited from
  operating as a repeater station or as a
  signal booster. This prohibition in-
  cludes store-and-forward packet oper-
  ation.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2009-title47-vol5/pdf/CFR-2...

Pretty clear cut. No packet routing, at all, for any reason, using any method. Doesn't matter if the radio firmware is doing it or if the client is doing it.

(There is a general exemption to all licensing rules, at least in ham radio, in the case of "to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available." (§97.403 Safety of life and protection of property.) Not terribly applicable in this situation, but a general "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" kinda thing.)

Then don't use packets, use a streams of hashes or something mathematically similar that doesn't fit the characteristics of a packet, but still retains the security, and integrity of the information.

I wonder whether the FCC is going to consider Bluetooth <-> MURS interconnection to be in violation of this rule.

You're right, that seems to be a very real regulatory risk for this product. Basically, this product is a cross band repeater between the ISM band and the MURS band. Just because the encoding is different doesn't not make it a repeater.

Bluetooth is a short range encrypted point to point link. It would be considered part of the station. Repeaters, in radio jargon, generally accept input from many sources, often without access control.

What's the rationale of the FCC to disallow this? Purely economic reasons?

I think congestion is the main reason. If a transmission had unlimited range (hypothetically), the band would fill up pretty quickly, so it would stop being useful. Natural limits of signal transmission and power limits are what makes public, unlicensed bands feasible. They limit the possible uses, but, stochastically, enables many people to use it at the same time.

At any repeater hop, the transmission uses double the airtime in the overlapping of the sender's and repeater's ranges (once while the sender is sending it, once while the repeater is repeating). And of course, if you use repeaters, a single transmission will use the band in a much larger area than a direct transmission.

With a mesh network, a product like this would be very problematic: From "a way to connect with friends while off the grid" it would turn into "unlimited free texts for a one time charge" (in a country with absurd charges for texting on mobile phones). Soon, neither this nor any other application on the band would be possible anymore.

Congestion is definitely the main reason. What we've done at goTenna's networking layer though, is we've made it listen-before-talk. That, added to the fact that we're only doing short-burst transmissions, makes it highly unlikely goTenna will ever "step on other tranmissions' feet."

Do you intend to release the specifications for the protocol you are using? For example, would I be able to hook a computer with gnuradio up to a MURS radio and write software that could communicate with a goTenna?

This. I am super excited about the GoTenna because it is basically Ham Radio for the masses. But I'd also like to talk to GoTenna users with SDR or similar - in the spririt of non-encrypted ham communication.

We have an open SDK coming out soon -- you can sign up for developer updates at our website

That sounds like a way to write programs that use a bluetooth attached gotenna. Is that correct?

What I am asking is, could I talk to a gotenna using another radio setup of my own creation. Are you publishing enough information about gotenna for me to do that?

I ordered mine when the page went live. I hope to get them soon and start enjoying them. I'm actually headed out to Colorado to climb the Collegiate Peaks so I'm hoping they get here before mid-August.

Don't worry. I've got a ham license and I'm bringing my 2m/70cm HT with me and a SatCom set too. Would be nice to give it a go in real-world conditions.

What about for users of GoTenna in other countries that don't have the MURS band mesh restriction? Will they be allowed to enable mesh delivery through a third party on their device?

Offtopic:

Yet another site that uses a ton of scrolling, space, and images to provide information that would fit in a couple of paragraphs. It's true that a picture can speak a thousand words. On the other hand a few dozen words can make up for six giant pictures that convey little information.

Note to mention the giant video that greets me. Has this actually proven effective, as it becomes more and more common? I don't know about most, but I will seldom watch a product video during my day - I don't have time or patience to wait for speed-of-speech delivery of information.

</rant>

Agreed. I simply couldn't be bothered - particularly as I was already trying to scroll down past the huge video to find content before the page had finished loading, leaning to page-jumping hilarity. I gave up almost immediately and came to visit the comments to find out what it was.

Say you are just 1 mile from a friend, at 151Mhz the fresnel zone is 72ft tall. If you are both at equal elevation on flat land then 50% of the signal is going to be absorbed by the ground. How exactly does this scenario work?

Source: I used to build outdoor medium distance (~1mi) wireless data networks with 900Mhz and at 1 mi the fresnel zone is roughly 30ft tall so we would put our antenna 20ft in the air. The awesome thing is we could shoot through a mile of forest but only if 60+% of the fresnel zone was not occluded by the ground.

Edit: I should also add that I would have loved something like this in Iraq. Next to keeping soldiers fed, coordinating with adjacent units (read: not shooting at each other) on foot during a mission is about the biggest challenge there is.

The propagation characteristics of VHF are substantially better than 900MHz. I've used voice radios in the VHF band in urban Minneapolis, and have been able to easily surpass a mile of range. I'm surprised they didn't choose a lower frequency still.

In addition, using something like DSSS, a low data rate, and retransmission ability will probably help a lot for this application.

Agreed. Substantially better. Our first goTenna prototypes worked at 900 MHz band and we could barely get 0.5 km (NOT MILES) line of sight. With the goTennas that are now out for pre-order, we've gotten anywhere from 0.5 miles to 3.5 miles in NYC (where we're based), to give you an idea -- and there's little that is as non-ideal for RF propagation than a metropolitan city.

This can be significantly better than walkie-talkies. In poor reception, sometimes you can't manage to deliver even a simple message coherently (especially since, to be understood by a fellow human, you need reliable communication in real time for the duration of your entire message).

But usually, you just want to get a message across. You want something like morse code, not voice. Delivering a short textual message, not in real-time but "instantly", with redundancy, error correction and retries, serves me better than walkie talkies.

(Heck, you can deliver a short audio fragment, but I don't see too many people using the "send voice" feature in Whatsapp, don't know about you.)

Preach on! :) Yes, we think we're better/more convenient than walkie-talkies for a few reasons. 1) We integrate with the smartphone you already have on you. 2) The asynchronous communication, as you said, allows for less miscommunication. Plus, with delivery confirmation receipts you KNOW it didn't just disappear into the void somewhere, and was actually received by your intended recipient(s). 3) You can direct the message specifically to discrete individuals or groups. You don't need to worry about being on the same channel or hear other people you don't know yakking. 4) You can share your location on detailed offline maps.

What 'offline maps' are available? Something built into the gotenna app, the device's native mapping app, or something else?

The app comes with a vector map of the entire world. You can then download specific areas to get complete detail (i.e. down to hiking trails and city blocks) before you head out -- depending which maps you want you'll download via small country (e.g. France) or state (e.g. California). All goTenna maps are free!

I hear you, but I'd bet on my MURS capable radio to outlast my iPhone (with BT on) and whatever spare (heavy) batteries on my week long backpacking trip.

Maybe not the use-case you guys are targeting, just food for thought.

Either way, great idea/product and use of the Multi Use spectrum.

The part I think is missing is a connection back to the cell network so that you can give people in more remote locations the ability to text the rest of the world using this as a link. I don't see the 2-user walky-talky being that useful, but I would happily leave this and an extra phone in my car if it meant getting text functionality as I hike out 20 miles.

> The part I think is missing is a connection back to the cell network so that you can give people in more remote locations the ability to text the rest of the world using this as a link.

While reading their FAQ I thought of that, and if the API is open sourced or reverse-engineered, it shouldn't be too difficult to write a smartphone application which would act as a relay between to goTenna and the phone network (for instance if the relay-phone receives on the goTenna a message from A saying "SMS <num> foo bar" it could relay the "A says: foo bar" via SMS to <num>.

It could be a whole lot simpler than this. (And a whole less secure.) In high school I had a server running that scanned email for a keyword and my cellphone number; I didn't have a smartphone. So I texted a keyword and some code to my email. Then my server would read the email, see it contained the keyword, then interpret the rest of the code I sent and execute it. This would be insanely easy (and not too secure) to implement on Android for instance.

I mean, I know it's not secure. But I had no clue it was down-vote-not-secure!

They're not downvoting you because it's not secure; they're downvoting you because you don't understand what the product does.

Then you misunderstood, or I am perpetually misunderstanding. The comment that I responded to asked for a way to use this product to send actual text messages. He wanted to relay a message to another phone via this product and then have his phone send an actual text message using information from the initial message. I gave a suggestion about how to do that.

Daniela, goTenna co-founder here -- back-haul is the 'easy part.' We just wanted to start with the hard part, i.e. a communication system that never requires central connectivity; a smart network with no actual central brain.

It sounds like you don't even need the hard part for a viable product: range extender for cell phones targeted at people engaged in outdoor activities but parked somewhere with cell phone reception.

Technically, this has been possible for a long time, but it is not allowed for regulatory reasons, and those regulations are not just there because somebody enjoys being a killjoy. Radio transmission and networks are a complex subject matter. Most of all, they're a scarce, common resource and it's easy to mess things up for others.

If you want real off the grid connectivity, buy or rent a sat phone or a satellite emergency notification device (there are pretty affordable choices for both).

If there were a band of legitimately useful long range spectrum that was a free for all, wouldn't there be a strong economic incentive for people to invent modulation techniques capable of functioning effectively in such a noisy environment?

Alternatively, wouldn't it be conceivable for transmitting nodes to cooperate with one another to send transmissions. For example, if N nodes all transmit encrypted content on the same band to M receivers, then the signals of all but one of those N transmitters look like noise to each of the M receivers, thus limiting the transmission rate achievable over any given channel. If instead of that approach, what if a transmitter instead used a second frequency solely for the purpose of coordinating transmissions with the other nodes so as to minimize interference which each other. In addition to coordinating when they are or are not transmitting, couldn't they selective choose different modulation techniques that are easily distinguishable from one another, and thus transmittable simultaneously.

Feel free to educate or correct me here. I know very little about this domain.

If somebody reverse engineers their API and their devices are being used illegally for mesh networking, the most likely thing is not a mesh networking revolution [1], but the FCC taking their devices off the market. Daniela's reply to your posting could be seen as endorsing this, which won't help.

[1] you can legally do this in other bands, and there are some pretty cool open source projects.

Totally agree on how the FCC might react, but I don't see how you interpreted Daniela's response as an endorsement of reverse engineering their APIs to enable illegal mesh networking.

Right ;)

I love it... I wonder if there will be some kind of base station available? I'm thinking about Scout camps, where we turn up on a campsite with a few hundred kids, and often use radios to talk between important adults. The range would need to be a few miles, so WiFi is out of the question. Too expensive mind, but very very cool!

These would be great for vacation travel. I sometimes travel with another couple and we often split up during the day. I prefer not to pay for cell service in these countries (high cost, I'm on vacation, can check email later, don't want to be tempted to spend time on my phone etc) but this would be nice since it restricts it to messages to the other couple only and location info. Very tempted to buy a pair.

Does anyone have details on the RF layer? What band does it use? What emission type does it use? What bit rate does it send at? What happens when 1000 of these are in the same place at once?

From what I am reading, it runs on Multi-Use Radio Service (MURS). i.e. 151-154 Mhz spectrum.

Excerpt From https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-02-139A1.p...

Under the revised rules, MURS units are: • Permitted to have detachable antennas; • Permitted to have external antennas up to 6.1 meters (20 feet) above a structure or 18.3 meters (60 feet) above the ground, whichever is higher; • Permitted to have a total power output (TPO) of up to two (2) watts (instead of two (2) watts effective radiated power); • Not permitted to be used as cordless telephones, radiofacsimile (imaging), or for continuous carrier mode operations; and • Not permitted to be used for repeater operations

Without a repeater, I would assume it is very difficult to imagine a hop-by-hop network?

The larger antenna would certainly suggest the lower frequency.

They also explicitly forbid store-and-forward operations.

Unless it is very fast store-and-forward?

Unfortunately, both acting as a repeater live and in SaF mode are prohibited.

Can anyone provide some insight into why this would be? What's the intention of these restrictions?

Theoretical capacity on the bands maybe?

In the PDF that nitinics linked, https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-02-139A1.p..., check out the bottom of page 13.

  Because repeaters utilize two channels at once (input and
  output) and extend the operating range of a single user,
  their use would limit the number of users able to share
  these frequencies at the same time.
  ...
  some commenters are concerned that MURS frequencies will be
  congested and that repeater use will only aggravate this
  problem. We agree.

Basically, they want to maximize the number of users that are able to reasonably use this band. At the time (1998-2002), two-way radios were much more popular than they are today (cell phones have largely made them obsolete), so I can understand the concern.

For whatever reason, MURS never did became as popular as GMRS or FRS did.

Reminds me of the Cybiko: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko

"Early supporters get 50% off for a limited time."

I always wonder about this kind of pricing structure. It seems like selling your product for half of what you plan to eventually charge for it gives you pretty useless data on what the proper price should be. You may sell a ton at $100, but people perceive that as expensive, and then you might sell zero at $200.

I imagine they are profitable at 50% and therefore if they don't sell any at full price, they could come back down to 50% off (or somewhere similar).

It's a walkie talkie that uses a BT audio connection to your phone to use the mic and speaker of your phone as the mic and speaker for the walkie talkie, brilliant as many people will think it is magic cellular. Save yourself a lot of money and just buy a walkie talkie with it's own regular mic and speaker.

So my guess is, it's a bluetooth radio and a XBee. Nice? I think? What surprises me is the size of it; I've deployed exactly this (minus the spiffy packaging, admittedly) for barge tracking applications since 2008, and the whole thing ended up being roughly the size of an early 2000s palmtop computer, so good job on that!

The schematic is trivial: a xbee XSC (we used XStreams at the time) with a decent antenna coupled with any serial bluetooth module. The whole thing runs on 3.3V with high tolerances, so a single lithium cell is enough to power it without regulation.

If you can't do meshing for legal reasions, do a transparent blind forward -- for short messages that you don't mind a delay for, it works out well, and the FCC (and the coast guard) have been OK with it. If you want my design contact me at www.f3.to

No. It is in the 150MHz (VHF) range, which is probably one reason why it is as long as it is. I assume they rolled at least a semi-custom radio solution.

Yes, we've built everything from scratch! It's been fun/impossible. :)

Very cool! I'm messing with low bandwidth satellite communication, and well, looks like you're way ahead of me :D

@Daniela I hope you aren't exhausted by all these, but X would be cool comments. If not: A walkie-textie would be cool, something less expensive and fragile (as emilv said) than a smartphone with a keyboard instead of a touch screen. Is there a serial interface to gotenna?

I believe you're asking if there's a user interface to goTenna? If so, not in the current device. The UI is your smartphone -- the point is to conform to consumer behavior (i.e. the way you already text on your phone).

For longer periods of outdoor use, a low-power built-in text interface would be useful. Especially if the battery lasts longer than my phone's.

Is there an alternative to bluetooth-LE for talking to the gotenna?

Our first prototypes worked over the audio jack (à la Square) but from both performance and form factor perspectives, having it work wirelessly over BLE worked better. That being said we can work audio and other data interfaces into later products for sure, we're just going MVP route ;)

I slid the range slider all the way down as I'm in the, notoriously flat, Netherlands. Most of the time I'm in a city, Amsterdam, and then I'd have a range of 0 miles. Is that correct? That does not sound very useful to me then.

Can someone confirm that this is correct?

I think their slider is a bit misleading as if you have the slider at 0ft then the range is 0 but if you have it at 5ft then the range is up in the miles.

I think their point is that if you need to use this then you may need to seek slightly higher ground... or some stairs...

Most people are 5ft tall!

But most pockets are only about 32" off the ground. Maybe they should sell hats that it attaches to.

We industrially designed a nylon attachment strap to each goTenna so you can attach it wherever you'd like. Including, I suppose, your head.

Correct!

This is pretty interesting. I work for an NGO and something like this looks really useful for people working in the field to allow some sort of simple communication/location when you don't have service, or it is super expensive.

If your looking for a wider scope project for your NGO, you might want to consider something more like the Mesh Potato

http://villagetelco.org/mesh-potato/

Hey, we're working with all kinds of disaster relief nonprofits and the like. Would be great to hear from you: partnerup@gotenna.com

This is a consumer device that adds a smartphone as a single point of failure.

There's a good reason why handheld or car mounted radios have been quite popular with NGOs all over the world. They're robust, reliable and simple. And in many cases, NGOs can get access to radio bands with more interesting transmission characteristics.

What happens to a message if it's not received? Will it be retransmitted or is it lost? Do I know if my message has been received by my contact (1:1) or anyone (1:all)?

goTenna will retry sending your message a few times, and then if it still doesn't go through, will alert you that it hasn't been delivered. At that point you can try again manually.

There are delivery confirmation receipts for 1:1 messaging but not for groups as that's a networking nightmare (e.g. not even Whatsapp or iMessage does that).

Asking to learn. I travel often all over India and most parts of Africa. I have consistently received cell phone signals in 90% of the places. Local sim cards are easily available and the prices are ~20cents per message. In this context, I wonder the need of such a device. In fact having yet another device to charge is a bigger concern. I can see situations where this is helpful, but I think it is in the minority.

I have not been to Africa or India, but considering that it's easy to find areas of North America without cell phone coverage I find it very difficult to believe your assertion about 90% coverage. Even in cities, it seems from the comments here that there is some appeal to communicating "off the grid" as it were.

His assertion is true, i have traveled to 4+ countries in africa, and live in one.

I have yet to be without signal in all my travels. You would need to go really remote to find a place without signal.

Even sparsely populated areas, backwaters are covered. The reason is communication infrastructure was pretty bad here, hence we leap frogged and mobile is primary means of communication.

You also have the other challenge of copper being stolen, hence in some areas the only way for you to get comms (internet/phone) is via mobile.

> I have yet to be without signal in all my travels. You would need to go really remote to find a place without signal.

In contrast, I can travel ~20 minutes outside a major metropolitian area in the US (Seattle) and be without cell service.

Heck I often am without cell service when I'm hiking. Then again I'm using a provider (T-Mobile) which is known to only work in metro areas!

I was going to write this part in my original email but wanted to stick to the main concern about use cases. I do live 3-4 months a year in NYC and in my pre-war building, T-mobile has spotty coverage. If I travel to Connecticut, 90 minutes away, there are many spots en-route where I do not get a signal.

I live in the US (Los Angeles) and there are plenty of places where this functionality (if not the form factor) would come in handy. For example, service can get spotty in underground parking structures (common in LA) making it impossible to text someone nearby to ask "where did you park?" Another place that has bad reception is Disneyland. There are no towers inside the park and the berm that separates the park from the city of Anaheim seems to block out signals pretty well, so this device would help groups keep in contact there.

While traveling, two places that come to mind where cell reception is nonexistant would be hiking in the mountains or while at sea. My wife and I bring walkie-talkies on cruise ships, but an SMS is more discreet than a chirp and speakerphone.

From the FAQs: "Use our free app to type out a text message or share a location."

Ugh, it's a lot less magical than they make it seem in the video.

All it takes is replacing the actual phone dialer app (which AFAIK can only be done in AOSP-based distributions) to make it work transparently.

You'd also have to add a phone number broadcasting service to make it work with phone numbers though, but I can see the potential. I'm much more skeptical about range, battery or security concerns.

> You'd also have to add a phone number broadcasting service to make it work with phone numbers though, but I can see the potential. I'm much more skeptical about range, battery or security concerns

Have the app sync to a registry online when connectivity is available, and keep the key-value table locally (phone->deviceID).

Can these things share accurate telemetry data so you can add a geospatial data layer? That would be great because if they are communicating anyway getting relative location should be reasonable and make keeping track of folks much easier while not having to rely on LOS.

edit: I see the maps feature but I also see the text of the messages asking where someone is, so that is what spurred the question.

I'm most excited for the mountaineering / backcountry application in the short term but as critical mass develops in urban areas, there could be an interesting ecosystem that develops around this even without repeater functionality. Anything from people discovery like Tinder to b2c interaction like OrderAhead could build on top of a comm stack like this.

Ham packet for non-geeks !

Is goTenna crowdfunding on Indiegogo or is this a scam? If it is, how can we get it taken down? https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gotenna/x/8214478

Wow, this is definitely a scam.

They say that you can take it anywhere. But is it legal to use anywhere? It's not using any worldwide ISM band, so I assume they're bit lost with this topic too. So you can take it anywhere, but you can't use it legally everywhere.

Looks like a show stopper in Canada; http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/smt-gst.nsf/eng/sf10822.html

That seems wonderful, maybe in the future this could have an SDK where developers could use the device for something other than messaging, for example long range car remote! or any type of long range RC.

100%!!! Our dev kits will be available soon: http://bit.ly/1oRwBkI

Lengthier but more accurate title: Send and receive messages to other GoTenna devices within range via alternate RF-band communications even when you don't have service.

A text-mode walkie-talkie.

I wonder how hackable these will be, or what kind of bandwidth you might be able to push. I could see putting one at my home and one at my office to create a poormans wireless bridge.

It's 2 meter VHF, very low bandwidth. Useful for GPS and text messages only. An Email bridge might be pretty cool, but I'm not sure of the exact speed.

Yes, we're focused, with this first product, on asynchronous, low-bandwidth data comms. Through our R&D for the past 21 months, that's what most testers and people wanted most, especially when they don't have service otherwise.

I can see myself using this during my mountain/road biking trips with friends, although the form format doesn't look very practical on the back pockets of cycling jerseys.

Let's build our own cellphonenetwork, where we all have something like this and it's like a giant p2p network!

Potential cool application of GoTenna: communication with a robot without having to pay for a data plan.

Uh, just use Zigbee or something similar?

Zigbee: "Outdoors with line-of-sight, range may be up to 1500 m depending on power output and environmental characteristics"

I'd buy one of these GoTennas before you get too excited about the range.

"Oh, but it's VHF so you can get Es propagation and talk to Europe from the US!"

Good luck with that.

Zigbee is very low power and much higher frequency. You have to be within a couple dozen meters.

The goTenna thing is much higher power and lower frequency. It reaches at much greater distance, and can even go a bit around small obstacles (it's 2m band, so don't expect miracles, but still, it's not 100% line of sight).

You're right. I could use a good radio. Downsides: the Bluetooth local connection is wasteful, the bandwidth is going to be pretty low, and I can't immediately see if they have an open developer license.

Wireless is very hard. If you've spent much time working with it, it's amazing how good wifi and cellphones are.

Get a ham radio license and you'll have access to lots of spectrum and the ability to use higher power levels, for non-commercial use.

Very cool. I hope this becomes at least a niche success and the price comes down in future versions.

At $150 for two devices, it seems like a good deal for something that you would use once or twice a year. If the price goes up (as the website suggests that it is currently being offered at a 50% off promo), then I doubt it will become a mainstream device.

Great device, great idea! Please allow orders from within the EU... That would be awesome!

They should maybe pause the video in the masthead when the overlay video is playing.

It does! Which OS/browser are you using?

Same thing on Firefox 30 on Win 7.

It didn't bother me much though, it's faded to almost-white and I only noticed because I read this comment before.

What band does this operate in? Do I need a license to operate one in the EU?

Seems to be shipping to US & Canada only for now.

Oh that's pretty cool.. It's like a walky-talky but for data

Looks interesting.

What radio service and frequencies does it use?

Ah.

We are now at a device that is Bluetooth LE-enabled that works on the 151-154 MHz range from http://www.cnet.com/news/gotenna-creates-cell-network-out-of...

So this is essentially a mesh network or at least all independent nodes?

Sounds more like a point to point communication but not a mesh to me.

Yes, and she answered the question in a different thread.

`Pending FCC approval.`

how hackable will this be? Will the end user be able to turn up the signal strength and gain? (similar to what I can do on my wifi access point?)

Our open SDK is coming soon. You can't really mess with signal strength and gain (especially bc of FCC regulations)

GoTenna + Mesh networking = go f### yourself ATT

Wow. I just need to figure out how to relay messages from my Ooma phone to one of these devices for forwarding on and good riddance to cell provider services.

if this is available on some kind of rental plan, there is a huge opportunity....

off topic but a simpiler website would have been nice. All the video and huge pictures of half dressed people is too much to browse for work.

what is old is new again. Whats next, pens and paper as a new way to send messages without a phone?

i will be taking round A for a direct marketing company for affluent consumers via the gotenna network.

Is it me or is their a guy in the video getting baked? Not only that it is around the security part where he is getting in contact with his mate "Jason Greengrocer" about getting more. That part makes me happy!

I think they are quite deliberately pointing out that dealers can communicate with their users in private, outside of law enforcement spying on them [Use case A1].

I like the fact that can be publicly advertised as a unique selling point.

Also, if they're not encrypting the radio transmission, easily intercept-able.

All transmissions are end-to-end encrypted, unless you use the "shout" or "emergency" features which are, by definition, messages to everyone within range of you.

For those who care about security, is there an article to read for further details on that?

Hi! I'm on the mobile development team here at goTenna. We're taking advantage of the Bluetooth LE standard encyption with is AES-CCM. More on that here: http://bit.ly/1teKWvG

For encrypting the data as it's sent between gotennas we're using 1024 bit RSA. Not sure what level of detail you'd like.. but here are a few things to get you started!

RSA itself: http://bit.ly/1kDlTgP Cryptographic Services: http://bit.ly/1teLhPb More on CDSA (see above articles first): http://bit.ly/Ug2CLt

Much of our approach is fairly standard!

So, question: How do you authenticate the person you are trying to message with, i.e. How do I know that I'm sending the message I want to send to (the real) Jason Greengrocer not the FBI pretending to be Jason?

At set up, you can either set up your goTenna ID to be your phone number (recommended, as it will then integrate with your contact list and make it easy for other people you know using goTenna to find you with goTenna) or a randomly generated string we create for you (for the crypto people out there!). The way we ensure your (or Jason Greengrocer's!) phone number isn't spoofed is we verify your phone number through the regular telephony network when you do have connectivity. If you complete setup without connectivity and enter a telephone number as your ID, you will show up as "Unverified." We don't recommend offline setup though because then you can't download all our awesome detailed offline map packs (you'll just get the world vector map that comes with the app at download).

I thought encryption on amateur radio frequencies was not allowed?

Not an issue on MURS; you're thinking of GMRS.

Daniela, goTenna co-founder here, "Jason Greengrocer" is actually a real person in my phone I contact about once a month ;)

Are you suggesting Jason lives in your phone?

So it's just a walkie talkie that has bluetooth? You can buy decent walkie talkies for £20, I'm not what paying £100 is getting me.

From the few details [1] I've been able to find it seems like it's unusable in the UK anyway as it uses 151-154 MHz, which is a licensed band. If they moved it up into the 433ishMHz unlicensed band their range claims would all have to be revised.

[1] http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/no-signal-gotenna-has-a-messagi...

We'll expand internationally later!

To me it seemed like part of your sales pitch was infering that you could use it internationally where you don't have service or don't want to pay the high overages ;)

We're currently shipping to only US & Canada for regulatory reasons ;)

I guess the main difference is that walkie-talkies don't connect to your phone, or share text or GPS data. They also don't mesh network (automatically).

No voice? That lost all of my interest. So now I need to tap out a message on my expensive, somewhat fragile smartphone with dirty fingers while losing all sight of the road for a minute. Instead of a sturdy walkie-talkie where I can hear the voices of my friends, talk efficiently in real sentences and I can look where I'm going all the time.

I get it's not for everyone, but what we learned as we developed this is that more people wanted asynchronous data comms as opposed to real-time voice. And when I say "more," I mean like, 75% of testers preferred the former.

From a networking perspective, as well, it makes our ad hoc reconfigurable network more scalable if we're focused on short-burst transmissions that are, technically speaking, delay-tolerant. This means that even if you're at a huge event with tons of people using goTenna, even if a gajillion of them press "send" at the exact same femtosecond, all the messages can get through in a matter of seconds if not milliseconds.

That is a good point. But then I'm even less sure where I would use this. Definitely not when out hiking in the woods.

I still believe I'm with the 25% that didn't prefer asynchronous messaging.

I think they are legally forbidden from doing voice by the FCC, on the ultra low band spectrum they're using. (see http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/multi-use-radio-service-murs... search for "you can not make telephone calls")

If you want walkie-talkies, there's another entire band dedicated to unlicensed voice calls - http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/family-radio-service-frs

You could ask them to make a dual mode device. MURS for text/sms (and greater distance), and FRS for voice and picture messages (with less distance).

We're calling the "very high frequency" band the "ultra low band" now? Interesting.

while losing all sight of the road for a minute.

You could stop for a second, I guess.

Instead of a sturdy walkie-talkie

Why don't you just buy a walkie-talkie? They're cheaper, they just don't interface with your phone. But it sounds like that's what you want.

"When you're off-grid you can remain connected."

Lol, humans.

Can we get rid of this trend of having such media-heavy product pages? The HTML5 header video is nifty, but the page is ~20MB to load. Is that really necessary to describe a product?

It's not like I disagree but discussing this aspect of every new thing that comes along is rather tiresome.

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