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.
Jordan - Thanks for the report from "Them That's Doing (Meshtastic). It's well past the "perhaps" interesting stage, and it's now queued as yet another project to tackle in N8GNJ Labs during the warm, productive Summer months here in Bellingham (The City of Subdued Excitement) Washington.
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 ;-)
Doc - I agree that I've been thinking also about how to assist the growing Meshtastic community by putting additional, well-built, reliable relay nodes in place. I want to encourage folks to experiment with data communications over radio!
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)
Ready - Yeah, Amateur Radio has stumbled through multiple generations of data communications over radio technology and sometimes we're loathe to give up what we know in order to wrap our heads around something that's new. I don't think we're going to get I, K, and Y to wrap their heads around cheap, efficient data radios when their entire business model for selling into the Amateur Radio market is expensive, legacy mode FM and semi-proprietary digital voice modes. But provably, there's money to be made and it's hilarious to me that Adafruit and all the other maker widget companies are now effectively in the "radio" market for Meshtastic. We've seen these "distruptive technology" moments before.
I only mention the big three because they seem to be able to sell radios for much more than $29. When the latest APRS ready HT from Kenwood clocks in at $750(!) surely there's money being left on the table for a more functional SDR based HT. I really want to like the RFinder B1, but it seems like they just slapped an Android phone into a DMR radio case, keeping both RF paths separated. Granted, more than I've done to advance the state of the art, but geez, we can do much better!
Ready - I'm in agreement that RFinder "radios" are a poor kluge - not impressed.
The closest I'm aware of for a "SDR HT" is M17's OpenHT - https://m17project.org/news/openht-proof-of-concept-populated-pcb. If M17 is able to make this much progress, it's certainly NOT insurmountable tech for I, K, and Y. But thinking about it a bit deeper than "they just want lock-in on their proprietary technology", I think that it may be the case that they're genuinely scared of real Software Defined Radio capabilities. Look at what the hacking on various Chinese portable radios is doing to change the original function. I, K, and Y all make their real profit from commercial customers and they may not want their brand names "tainted" by "hackers" making an I, K, or Y software defined radio do things that take it into "unintended" areas of spectrum like public safety. The Chinese just don't care about such things - they'll just slap a new brand name on it and continue on another few years until that brand gets "slapped" and then lather, rinse, repeat.
Not to mention that they're simply not equipped to do traditional customer service for such units. Thus it's going to fall to brave, small companies like Connect Systems with the CS7000 M17 PLUS (https://www.connectsystems.com/products/top/radios/CS7000_M17_PLUS.htm) or groups like M17 to get a portable software defined transceiver into the hands of interested Amateur Radio Operators.
All good points. But digital voice modes remind me of electric cars. The genesis of DV was that the part 90 spectrum was saturated and so the FCC and their counterparts in the ITU decided the solution was narrowbanding. To get decent audio out of a 6.25 KHz channel (within the allotted timeframe) they had to do some aggressive processing which led to the AMBE chip. Hams had no such mandate so we got a lot of bargain repeaters and kept our 12.5 KHz FM channels.
EVs are much the same. A mandate from the top to come up with a solution to CO2 emissions. I'm not going to get into the debate over anthropogenic global warming, but EVs are trying to recreate what gasoline engine vehicles have been optimized to do for 100 years, and they're failing for many of the same reasons for digital voice.
Neither of them are playing to their strengths. In the case of EVs, the convenience of a short hop commuter vehicle that is largely maintenance free and can be charged overnight. In the case of DV systems, the fact that there's a lot of potential in the DIGITAL aspect of the modes, but their "voice first" setup is disappointing. Now we have massive interstate data networks that are being used for the same thing our interstate FM networks were used for, and from what I've seen, repeater operators have no interest in opening up those networks to other users.
But there's hope on the horizon. The proposals in front of the FCC for eliminating the symbol rate rules are promising. I know there are lots of us looking for better ways of doing things. And with tools like Chat GPT the software is catching up to the hardware in ease of use and development. This thread has inspired me to dust off my Lime SDR and struggle up the learning curve again. Maybe this time something will stick!
Ready - I'll pass on the EV discussion as out of scope for ZR, but agreed that we Amateur Radio Operators using VHF / UHF spectrum have lots of latitude compared to our commercial counterparts in using VHF / UHF spectrum. I think one thing that argues for a paradigm shift in using VHF / UHF is that repeaters (the primary use of Amateur Radio VHF / UHF have largely fallen silent except for scheduled activities and natural moments such as morning and afternoon commutes. I discussed using a particular repeater for data activities (without "secondary" status such as having to schedule activities, announce on voice, yieled to voice activities, etc.) and that repeater owner said "OK with me - I just want the thing to get USED to justify keeping it on the air".
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"
Ron - Thanks for this pointer. A few months ago I became aware of "no RF hardware needed" capability for AREDN, but didn't look into it then. Thanks for the specific pointer and I think that's a valuable capability. One of the things I'm going to do is try to marry a lot of my test radios in N8GNJ Labs to AREDN nodes - why not use Amateur Radio LAN to Amateur Radio lower speed radio technologies? This kind of routing capability will be useful for that project.
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
Douglas - Thanks for that followup!
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.
Jordan - Thanks for the report from "Them That's Doing (Meshtastic). It's well past the "perhaps" interesting stage, and it's now queued as yet another project to tackle in N8GNJ Labs during the warm, productive Summer months here in Bellingham (The City of Subdued Excitement) Washington.
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.
Doc - I agree that I've been thinking also about how to assist the growing Meshtastic community by putting additional, well-built, reliable relay nodes in place. I want to encourage folks to experiment with data communications over radio!
An honourable mission indeed!
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)
Ready - Yeah, Amateur Radio has stumbled through multiple generations of data communications over radio technology and sometimes we're loathe to give up what we know in order to wrap our heads around something that's new. I don't think we're going to get I, K, and Y to wrap their heads around cheap, efficient data radios when their entire business model for selling into the Amateur Radio market is expensive, legacy mode FM and semi-proprietary digital voice modes. But provably, there's money to be made and it's hilarious to me that Adafruit and all the other maker widget companies are now effectively in the "radio" market for Meshtastic. We've seen these "distruptive technology" moments before.
I only mention the big three because they seem to be able to sell radios for much more than $29. When the latest APRS ready HT from Kenwood clocks in at $750(!) surely there's money being left on the table for a more functional SDR based HT. I really want to like the RFinder B1, but it seems like they just slapped an Android phone into a DMR radio case, keeping both RF paths separated. Granted, more than I've done to advance the state of the art, but geez, we can do much better!
Ready - I'm in agreement that RFinder "radios" are a poor kluge - not impressed.
The closest I'm aware of for a "SDR HT" is M17's OpenHT - https://m17project.org/news/openht-proof-of-concept-populated-pcb. If M17 is able to make this much progress, it's certainly NOT insurmountable tech for I, K, and Y. But thinking about it a bit deeper than "they just want lock-in on their proprietary technology", I think that it may be the case that they're genuinely scared of real Software Defined Radio capabilities. Look at what the hacking on various Chinese portable radios is doing to change the original function. I, K, and Y all make their real profit from commercial customers and they may not want their brand names "tainted" by "hackers" making an I, K, or Y software defined radio do things that take it into "unintended" areas of spectrum like public safety. The Chinese just don't care about such things - they'll just slap a new brand name on it and continue on another few years until that brand gets "slapped" and then lather, rinse, repeat.
Not to mention that they're simply not equipped to do traditional customer service for such units. Thus it's going to fall to brave, small companies like Connect Systems with the CS7000 M17 PLUS (https://www.connectsystems.com/products/top/radios/CS7000_M17_PLUS.htm) or groups like M17 to get a portable software defined transceiver into the hands of interested Amateur Radio Operators.
All good points. But digital voice modes remind me of electric cars. The genesis of DV was that the part 90 spectrum was saturated and so the FCC and their counterparts in the ITU decided the solution was narrowbanding. To get decent audio out of a 6.25 KHz channel (within the allotted timeframe) they had to do some aggressive processing which led to the AMBE chip. Hams had no such mandate so we got a lot of bargain repeaters and kept our 12.5 KHz FM channels.
EVs are much the same. A mandate from the top to come up with a solution to CO2 emissions. I'm not going to get into the debate over anthropogenic global warming, but EVs are trying to recreate what gasoline engine vehicles have been optimized to do for 100 years, and they're failing for many of the same reasons for digital voice.
Neither of them are playing to their strengths. In the case of EVs, the convenience of a short hop commuter vehicle that is largely maintenance free and can be charged overnight. In the case of DV systems, the fact that there's a lot of potential in the DIGITAL aspect of the modes, but their "voice first" setup is disappointing. Now we have massive interstate data networks that are being used for the same thing our interstate FM networks were used for, and from what I've seen, repeater operators have no interest in opening up those networks to other users.
But there's hope on the horizon. The proposals in front of the FCC for eliminating the symbol rate rules are promising. I know there are lots of us looking for better ways of doing things. And with tools like Chat GPT the software is catching up to the hardware in ease of use and development. This thread has inspired me to dust off my Lime SDR and struggle up the learning curve again. Maybe this time something will stick!
Ready - I'll pass on the EV discussion as out of scope for ZR, but agreed that we Amateur Radio Operators using VHF / UHF spectrum have lots of latitude compared to our commercial counterparts in using VHF / UHF spectrum. I think one thing that argues for a paradigm shift in using VHF / UHF is that repeaters (the primary use of Amateur Radio VHF / UHF have largely fallen silent except for scheduled activities and natural moments such as morning and afternoon commutes. I discussed using a particular repeater for data activities (without "secondary" status such as having to schedule activities, announce on voice, yieled to voice activities, etc.) and that repeater owner said "OK with me - I just want the thing to get USED to justify keeping it on the air".
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"
73
Ron - Thanks for this pointer. A few months ago I became aware of "no RF hardware needed" capability for AREDN, but didn't look into it then. Thanks for the specific pointer and I think that's a valuable capability. One of the things I'm going to do is try to marry a lot of my test radios in N8GNJ Labs to AREDN nodes - why not use Amateur Radio LAN to Amateur Radio lower speed radio technologies? This kind of routing capability will be useful for that project.