I've been playing around with Meshtastic for a number of months now. It still has some bugs to be worked out, but the concept is great.
I think it could very well be a gateway drug for amateur radio for some users, but it has a lot of very valuable use cases on its own - grid independent text messaging but also telemetry and IOT applications.
Perhaps most importantly, the barrier to entry is low. The units themselves are cheap, easy to program, and let you join city-wide mesh networks (and bigger ones through MQTT, if needed) with perhaps a tenth of a watt of output power and no license required.
Yes! Greetings from the UK and thanks for extracting the podcast text Steve.
This is something I have been banging on about in my online places. The more of us licensed Hams that can get involved in building these bridges, the more of a chance we can sustain this hobby and maintain the bands going forwards.
Yesterday I was parked on a hill overlooking my QTH below with an 868 antenna on a window mount and after months of playing with these nodes had my first stable message chat with a small group of people. Both licences and unlicensed. I really felt things were coming along.
Right next to my parked car was a security light with a solar panel on and I couldn't help but wonder whether the owner would let me add a little node. It would serve hundreds of houses and link two valleys. ;-)
Anyone with property on high ground will not only be lauded by the community. They shall become gods ;-)
I've been playing around with packet and various other wireless data schemes since the 1990s. In fact one of the reasons I got my license to begin with was a book I happened across in a library (around 1986) about packet radio, but I was busy being a teenager so I never learned Morse code and didn't get licensed until 1991 as a "no code" tech (which happened to grant me privileges in the bands I was interested in anyway). When I could afford a Kenwood TH-D7 I thought it was magic. Then I tried sending a message to another ham over APRS. Oh there aren't any, at least none who can figure out how to reply. Then Kenwood built the TH-D72, with input from Bob himself. Apparently Bob didn't text either, because the text input facility was still awful. Sure, you could haul around a laptop and connect using a terminal to type messages, but sort of defeated the purpose of having a communications device on your belt. So everyone just beaconed their position to no one in particular and saturated the channel with too many hops.
Fast forward a decade or so, and now we all have smart phones, solving the text input problem. Except that Apple adds their tax to use their devices (something now solved with USB C connectors on iPhone 15 BTW), and hams still don't like to type. Kenwood still doesn't have an app or way to interface with their radios (maybe they will with the TH-D75) with a smart phone. But they have a color display and bluetooth headset support!
Meanwhile a couple of millennial hackers couldn't send messages to their friends at Cochlea and Burning Man (actually after Hurricane Sandy according to company folklore) and decided to do something about it. They started GoTenna with a healthy dose of VC and radios for the unlicensed VHF spectrum around 150MHz. Then they got more funding to upgrade their radio to 900 MHz and a develop a mesh protocol. This became the GoTenna Mesh, which was pretty good, but the high cost was a deterrent and it was a commercial flop. However it did find a very big profitable niche with first responders and military users, and the company shifted to being military contractor. I have a set of GoTenna Mesh radios, but without anyone else using them, they are a mesh of two.
The concept is still pretty good, but at a price that's competitive with FRS radios. Enter Meshtastic. Cheap and easy to build, mostly using ESP32 boards. LoRA radio chip options from several vendors and again, cheap if buying by the tape reel. Antennas seem to be fairly hit-or-miss but at least they're avilable (I splurged on a few Diamond SRH 229 antennas for my T-Beams), and most importantly, a really functional smart phone app. This really should be showing the way for improving APRS, but it will take Icom, Kenwood and Yaesu to get the message.
And I should mention it will take hams to get onboard too. Hams seem to be the last holdouts for voice communications. Most of the old rag chewers seem to be openly hostile to touching a keyboard outside of a contest weekend. They have flip phones. They don't like screens. They like knobs. They don't like that "noise" cluttering up 144.39. And being that they talk a lot, they're very vocal when it comes to their vision of VHF communications, which is voice over "their" repeater, not data.
(Sorry, struck a nerve. Maybe because I burned so much $$ on lousy data radios over the years)
Steve, given you took interest in, and mentioned AREDN crosslinks in 147, I thought you might be interested the ability to run an AREDN router in software. No need for a MikroTik hAP ac2 or 3. It's not for the feint of heart.
I was sitting down with Ted (VE7ITR) for coffee yesterday and he mentioned that he was playing with AREDN and, instead of using a hardware router (ie. MikroTik hAP), he was running a hAP as a router in a virtual machine on a laptop. No hardware required other than a switch or hub to facilitate device connections.
You can find a "how to" on the AREDNmesh.org website in Documents. It just happens to be next after "Using Cross Links"
Here is a great LoRa APRS project that uses T-Beams. The iGate can even interface with KISS applications.
https://github.com/richonguzman/LoRa_APRS_iGate
https://github.com/richonguzman/LoRa_APRS_Tracker
I've been playing around with Meshtastic for a number of months now. It still has some bugs to be worked out, but the concept is great.
I think it could very well be a gateway drug for amateur radio for some users, but it has a lot of very valuable use cases on its own - grid independent text messaging but also telemetry and IOT applications.
Perhaps most importantly, the barrier to entry is low. The units themselves are cheap, easy to program, and let you join city-wide mesh networks (and bigger ones through MQTT, if needed) with perhaps a tenth of a watt of output power and no license required.
Yes! Greetings from the UK and thanks for extracting the podcast text Steve.
This is something I have been banging on about in my online places. The more of us licensed Hams that can get involved in building these bridges, the more of a chance we can sustain this hobby and maintain the bands going forwards.
Yesterday I was parked on a hill overlooking my QTH below with an 868 antenna on a window mount and after months of playing with these nodes had my first stable message chat with a small group of people. Both licences and unlicensed. I really felt things were coming along.
Right next to my parked car was a security light with a solar panel on and I couldn't help but wonder whether the owner would let me add a little node. It would serve hundreds of houses and link two valleys. ;-)
Anyone with property on high ground will not only be lauded by the community. They shall become gods ;-)
Cheers for a great post.
I've been playing around with packet and various other wireless data schemes since the 1990s. In fact one of the reasons I got my license to begin with was a book I happened across in a library (around 1986) about packet radio, but I was busy being a teenager so I never learned Morse code and didn't get licensed until 1991 as a "no code" tech (which happened to grant me privileges in the bands I was interested in anyway). When I could afford a Kenwood TH-D7 I thought it was magic. Then I tried sending a message to another ham over APRS. Oh there aren't any, at least none who can figure out how to reply. Then Kenwood built the TH-D72, with input from Bob himself. Apparently Bob didn't text either, because the text input facility was still awful. Sure, you could haul around a laptop and connect using a terminal to type messages, but sort of defeated the purpose of having a communications device on your belt. So everyone just beaconed their position to no one in particular and saturated the channel with too many hops.
Fast forward a decade or so, and now we all have smart phones, solving the text input problem. Except that Apple adds their tax to use their devices (something now solved with USB C connectors on iPhone 15 BTW), and hams still don't like to type. Kenwood still doesn't have an app or way to interface with their radios (maybe they will with the TH-D75) with a smart phone. But they have a color display and bluetooth headset support!
Meanwhile a couple of millennial hackers couldn't send messages to their friends at Cochlea and Burning Man (actually after Hurricane Sandy according to company folklore) and decided to do something about it. They started GoTenna with a healthy dose of VC and radios for the unlicensed VHF spectrum around 150MHz. Then they got more funding to upgrade their radio to 900 MHz and a develop a mesh protocol. This became the GoTenna Mesh, which was pretty good, but the high cost was a deterrent and it was a commercial flop. However it did find a very big profitable niche with first responders and military users, and the company shifted to being military contractor. I have a set of GoTenna Mesh radios, but without anyone else using them, they are a mesh of two.
The concept is still pretty good, but at a price that's competitive with FRS radios. Enter Meshtastic. Cheap and easy to build, mostly using ESP32 boards. LoRA radio chip options from several vendors and again, cheap if buying by the tape reel. Antennas seem to be fairly hit-or-miss but at least they're avilable (I splurged on a few Diamond SRH 229 antennas for my T-Beams), and most importantly, a really functional smart phone app. This really should be showing the way for improving APRS, but it will take Icom, Kenwood and Yaesu to get the message.
And I should mention it will take hams to get onboard too. Hams seem to be the last holdouts for voice communications. Most of the old rag chewers seem to be openly hostile to touching a keyboard outside of a contest weekend. They have flip phones. They don't like screens. They like knobs. They don't like that "noise" cluttering up 144.39. And being that they talk a lot, they're very vocal when it comes to their vision of VHF communications, which is voice over "their" repeater, not data.
(Sorry, struck a nerve. Maybe because I burned so much $$ on lousy data radios over the years)
As always, another awesome post.
Steve, given you took interest in, and mentioned AREDN crosslinks in 147, I thought you might be interested the ability to run an AREDN router in software. No need for a MikroTik hAP ac2 or 3. It's not for the feint of heart.
I was sitting down with Ted (VE7ITR) for coffee yesterday and he mentioned that he was playing with AREDN and, instead of using a hardware router (ie. MikroTik hAP), he was running a hAP as a router in a virtual machine on a laptop. No hardware required other than a switch or hub to facilitate device connections.
You can find a "how to" on the AREDNmesh.org website in Documents. It just happens to be next after "Using Cross Links"
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