Perhaps where you live.

Internet 101: Laws aren't the same everywhere.

Edit: My point wasn't specifically about amateur radio (I'm also one) nor where I live, but about the old-as-the-internet habit of people scoffing about what is and isn't legal without even knowing where the person they're replying to lives.

On the radio front, numerous countries require licences to legally listen to public broadcast radio (Switzerland, Slovenia and Montenegro are examples). If your handy dandy Baofeng UV5 can pick up broadcast FM radio frequencies, in such countries it will fall under licencing requirements even if you never transmit.

Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

I don't know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I've wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.

I'd be interested in reading a debate thread on Lemmy about this.

What the pros and cons to different communication methods are following a disaster that neutralizes mainstream methods of communication.

Benn Jordan just did a video on Meshtastic and other decentralized tech, so I'm inclined to believe in mesh technology. But I'm also curious about the high frequency stuff you mention

The four repeaters in my area are run by one club. They do the Field Day exercise every year and from what I remember they run them around 150w per repeater. A small jenny could run those fuckers on 15gal a day fairly easily. In a huge emergency, though, you can relay morse on just 5w through 5 or less relaying techs to most of the world without repeaters at all. (1 if you're lucky, but I'm being fair to real life interference).

Yeah... if I am trying to reach people tens of miles away during The Apocalypse, I am already dead.

Anyone who is within range to be helpful (or... not) would generally be within signal range of a handheld.

What about more extreme cases, say Castaway (movie) type situation. Stranded on an island in middle of nowhere.

But conveniently, one of the packages has a functional 2m battery powered radio and a Yagi too. There's no one you can make contact with, except... the ISS.
What if the ISS was the only station you could contact?
"Hello International Space Station, I am stranded on an island after a plane crash. Can you help?"

They sell 2 helteks so you can play around with them for about 50$. Used to be around 30. I have a couple, they do decently well.

Maybe you'd understand more things if you continued to read after the first opportunity you see to spew whatever you want to?

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

I'll also add on that it is useful to be able to practice and get familiar with a tool without risking a fine.

I wish this energy was just put towards promoting ham, tbh.

I wish you put more energy towards reading the comments you are replying to

If you don't know how to use a radio or set it up before the emergency then it's useless. You need to be ready before. And part of getting ready and learning is being licensed.

Yes. For true emergency/disaster relief, that is the baseline. I doubt most of the meshtastic repeaters will survive a real storm and you can bet people will be spamming/attacking longfast from the comfort of their homes a county or three over. And there is no good way to communicate proper regional channels ahead of time.

But not every internet outage is a disaster. I live in a region where it is not uncommon for construction crews to cut the fiber line and take out all traffic for the county... sometimes multiple times a month... And I can speak from experience that having a mesh network with locals is incredibly useful for "Yes, it is all of us. And Verizon/Tmobile/Spring is also out" as well as "If you go to the park on 5th and MLK you have line of sight to a working cell tower". And even just "So... I got all of Frasier on my Plex if anyone wants to hang out for a few hours".

If you whip out your emergency HAM radios (without a license) during that? You can bet ALL the narcs are gonna tattle on you because "you weren't prepared".

But even during the prelude to a disaster it can be an issue. We also have wildfires in the region and get a pretty big scare maybe once a decade. Last time we were in a state of "be ready to evacuate at a moment's notice" for the better part of a week. And just a bit of gossip that "today is going to be the day" was enough to trigger panic and clog up cell service faster than you can say "9-11". We even got an emergency push telling us that there were no planned evacuation orders for the day and to go about normal activities.

If you are someone frantically trying to figure out where the school took your kids? Yeah, you have an emergency. If you are someone who doesn't have a strong support network trying to figure out what is even going on? The narcs are gonna whinge at you. But, like I said, it is very useful to coordinate your evac with that support network. You can plan ahead of time to try to all get hotels/campsites in the town a few hours North. Then you drive through the hell of the evac until you get a few cell towers away, pull over, and use an app to book a hotel/campsite. But if all the people with families have to go South to pick up their kids from the school drop off site? You can only communicate when you are all an hour or three away from town and... ain't nobody going back through that traffic snarl.

Hopefully it ends up being a false alarm and you come back a week or two later to some smoke damage (that everyone TOTALLY fixes...) and not much else. But it's the difference between a week or two where you are able to hang out with your friends and have some degree of normalcy versus a week or two isolated and worried that you are going to lose everything.

And that is where mesh networks thrive. I am not talking about "I have a repeater in my garden" (which I should get on...). Stuff like the t-deck is what is actually useful. Plug it in, turn it on, and the pseudo-blackberries mesh with each other well enough for coordinating because enough people in town are doing the exact same thing.

One thing that people trying to make Meshtastic/Meshpro/whatever work might want to try:

odds are that your town/community have a social media system that is generally used to discuss events and the like (probably facebook, sometimes reddit). Make a post on there basically providing a link to a "getting started" guide and the credentials/key for the local mesh.

And, most importantly: Schedule an event (maybe every other month or once a quarter) where everyone with a device should turn theirs on and either be near a window or stand outside. That is a great way to rapidly detect all the temporary nodes that might only exist during a "not emergency" and for people to debug all the messes because meshtastic is a cluster.

Mine is on a map, but in a radius of around 10 miles. Close enough to let people know I'm here, but not accurate enough to easily track me down.

That said, if someone wanted to hunt me down, they certainly could triangulate me pretty quickly.

I think the point is to keep in contact with friends and family. Maybe it would be used to blast news or alerts in a time of war idk yet, I just ordered some radios a few days ago and I am waiting to get started with it.

Assuming Elon isn't part of it or doesn't restrict usage

Check out the Quickstart: https://rootaccess.org/wiki/Meshtastic/

There are others but this is from a local makerspace and I have personally done this setup. It works well, as long as there is a node in a high place.

Honestly though its a hobby not something that can be relied on unless your whole community gets together. Hope you have fun!

Oh it's a hundred percent just the novelty communication technology that is in vogue right now. I don't really know if it's a true zeitgeist technology or if someone with a lot of product to sell who is playing with the social media algorithm. But I guess I don't really care much.

The trick is to find a way to seize on that opportunity. Now that our mesh network is structurally sound and sufficient, I'm working on using a raspberry pi to automate our ham club meeting dates, testing dates, and field days, and then blast those messages once a week or so over the mesh network. That way, an impulse buy turns into the discovery of a fuctional network and afterwards, a random person can discover a whole local community of people with all sorts of new things to learn.

You can lead a horse to water. But you can't make him drink.

first you need a trough. That's the mesh network. After, the horse needs to be thirsty. That's the curiosity people have. information, the when and how and where, you can automate and passively tell them about. that's the water.

There was a massive power outage in Portugal not too long ago and people used Meshtastic to communicate between cities to see who had power.

It does work, but it’s not a Final Solution

Meshtastic has some store-and-forward stuff that's damn nice but someone has to set it up.

Meshcore has routers, repeaters and mailboxes.

It it could be pushed up to a few watts it would be far more useful.

JS8Call and FT8 are digital modes that don't require talking. Plenty of other things to do as well

Now let me introduce you to APRS 😁

It’s pretty much the HAM equivalent of Meshtastic

FT8 is fun and doesn't require talking. CW too but you need to learn Morse code.

Why not both? 😉

Great typo, I'm leaving it.

The question pool is so small you can memorize it :)

9/10 of the tech test is common sense or courtesy, and the bare minimum to make contact

If they can't charge an admittance fee or a per message fee, they won't implement it. It goes against their business model.

But we can dream.

Controlling home automation remotely without any internet access.

Tracking dogs, people or vehicles - again with no internet.

You're probably right. I noticed the feature, but haven't personally tried it.

You get shitloads more people to buy a cheap gadget that's easy carry with you.

If you start talking about ham radios and licences, most people loose interest before you finish the sentence.

Have you thought about not trying to drag meshtastic down to try and prop ham up?

I get it, you spent a bunch of time studying for your ham and you don't want it to feel like a waste, but lets be perfectly frank here- most people aren't going to get a HAM license. It IS, however, VERY accessible for someone to buy a cheap gadget on sale to try out.

I never understand why ham radio people always try to sabotage every other communication method, but you guys do it every time.

Let other people communicate how they want.

The HAM license isn’t a trivial checkbox test, at least not over here

Heck yeah get on the map. My area sees new repeaters weekly. If you build it they will come and it sounds like you know what to do.

https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map

Tree?

I'm not exactly standing behind it - just saying what I've read. I'm confident nuclear plants are after 9/11. Anything else is probably hit or miss, including petro/gas pipelines, coal, and generating plants specifically. Plus if a bad actor (likely state sanctioned) decides to, they can get through air gaps with spies/traitors/unwitting idiots with a simple USB drive. After air gapped uranium processing centrifuges were wrecked with an errant USB drive, I would expect all systems to disable or remove USB drive connectivity, but I'm sure that's inconsistent... at best.

A high powered antenna that transmits a lot of "static" would be a dead giveaway.

I'm not sure compression would solve the issue I mentioned - this would be probably more akin to using Napster to DL a song in 2001 via dialup, or trying to get an image off a newsgroup at best. I'm not saying it wouldn't be useful, just very limited. Like I said, you're not getting a full distro this way.

Yep, but what we had access to was far, far different than what we see today. I wouldn't have a problem with basic features like FTP, telnet, newsgroups or whatever, but the content will be limited. Gonna be back to dialup speeds.

It's pretty easy to jam as it's just radio waves. Increase the noise on the channel and the chirps of your msg don't get heard. That said there are some options to vary the channel as a group, and jamming a broad and robust mesh completely vs an area of nodes is a bit harder.

Trackable as in traceable? You mean finding your node location? By default not overly difficult but again, can be set up to make it hard to find you.

Riots are better coordinated when people can communicate wirelessly

A government can shut down a riot of 10,000

It struggles with 10 1,000 person riots.

This is a non answer. yes, hypothetically they can, but the whole point of finding alternative channels is to make it difficult for them to do so, to the point that they might not even try.

That pessimism of "they can jam it anyways" is like saying do not wear a helmet while riding a bike, if you are meant to die that day, you will die regardless of head protection.

Plus, it will take resources for them to jam things, and the more resources they need to do that shit the faster it will deplete them and the less they can do, it is so obvious I do not know how to write it without sounding demeaning.

Maybe so, but incompetence is persistent within fascist organizations, and it adds an extra problem for them to deal with, which has value for that fact alone.

Nope, it specifically uses free frequencies. The same ones that are used by RC hobbyists and RF based remotes

Licensed amateur radio operator here in the US. Meshtastic does not require an amateur radio license.

I don't actually own a Meshtastic device... but I did blow off work to do a little browsing and found this:

Meshtastic does not require any license and is open for anyone to use.

• https://www.austinmesh.org/learn/

Meshtastic does not require a HAM radio license to operate

• https://chicagolandmesh.org/...

don’t need an amateur radio license for the low-power bands used by Meshtastic

• https://centralvalleymesh.net/docs/faq/#q12

No US license required ISM band 915mhz < 1w

I ad-libbed to make my horrible analogy work. I am beyond regret

They list the elevation.

With the way things are going anyone with a moral compass is going to be a "bad actor" before long.

One in your state? Wouldn't you need one in your line of sight?

Welp, I guess I’m biting…

On the up side, you can get a Heltec V3 for ~$20

On the down side, since everything is super low power, you absolutley need line of site to get our of your neighborhood

In NSW Australia there are hardly any two near each other. What is the point of all these people even buying one if you don't team up with at least one neighbour?

That's the point, but it doesn't require an ISP

Internet routing is a bit more complex, but basically yes.

When I think of pagers I think of receiving only, not sending. Meshtastic devices can typically do both.

Kind of. But it is my understanding that pagers work with centralised transmitters/stations. I am no expert though, so maybe there is mesh-like pager protocols.

This is decentralised, a mesh. Routing is done through the terminals themselves, rather than through a centralised transmitter.

I believe you are correct.

I was imagining "into the future" though, where everyone has a device that meshes with like devices, creating a internet of connect devices to transport data over large distances. All decentralized, if one node goes down traffic routes a different way in the mesh.

Think Cellphone Towers for examples, but the idea is everyone would have their own device at home (or on them) that instead creates the mesh and simultaneously access the mesh.

In Switzerland, we already switched to MediumFast due to congestion in cities. It was a coordinated change and real world tests showed no significant worse mesh performance for most nodes. Meshtastic is evolving fast and I think it does become more and more viable as an off-grid or doomsday communication. It also is hard to censor which could be useful for journalism and free speech. Hence, not a substitute for the internet, but a more and more viable solution for many.

Can't speak about any mass gatherings or protests, but haven't had any issues so far with mine. Even in big cities, air util and ch util is below 35% so there is a lot more space available.

$20 is not a lot of money but there are people who can’t afford it anyway

Then they can't afford a phone or monthly service plan or really any communication devices at all.

Unless you live in an overpopulated area it will be pretty hard to find someone else using that kind of device

Literally designed for rural areas with poor cell service.

it don’t have a real application

Wait the real application that I use to communicate with and manage my node doesn't exist?

supposing someone make a business and start deploying the system for money

Yeah except this tech is already used with all kinds of smart and IoT devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/...