2024-06-28 — Two Projects for Making Amateur Radio Open Source Software Easier to Find and Use, BBS and email for Meshtastic, Zero Retries Correspondents Wanted
Your optimism is wonderful. Amateur radio has so much relevance as the gateway to discovery and knowledge of what is possible for scientific progress translating to human progress.
Your pride in citizenship of our country is shared here. I too feel blessed to have been born into this fragile experiment of democracy.
Greg - Thank you for the kind words. Amateur Radio isn't the be-all-and-end-all, but much like understanding computer systems is increasingly important, I feel it's also important to understand radio technology, and Amateur Radio helps cultivate that knowledge and curiosity.
BBS and email for Meshtastic: I have the feeling that someone is mostly reinventing the wheel again: There have been mail and BBS systems for extremely narrow band channels before: I started with an 300 bps acoustic coupler in the 1980s. I would take a look at http://ftsc.org/
Alexander - No question adding BBS and email to Meshtastic IS reinventing the wheel the Amateur Radio Packet Radio BBS and email! But what is new is that Meshtastic does not require a license to get started (under the most liberal interpretation of use of these devices for license-exempt portions of spectrum). Two other factors I've noted in effect for popularizing Meshtastic is that the Meshtastic devices are pretty cheap - under $100, and the self-education / promotion is very strong on Social Media - YouTube, Facebook, etc. It is easy to get interested, plug into an online community, and buy your first device. Contrast that to the comparatively complex process of getting interested in Amateur Radio, studying for the exam, taking the exam, registering with the FCC, figuring out Amateur Radio Packet Radio (or equivalents - New Packet Radio, VARA FM, CATS, etc. and the expense of buying a buying a modem for VHF or UHF radio, etc. AND... finding an Amateur Radio Packet Radio "community" in your area to actually be able to use the equipment. Meshtastic is a much lower barrier to entry, and low threshold of pain if you later turn out not to be impressed with Meshtastic or cannot find anyone in your area to communicate with.
Steve, you are looking into the wrong direction: I see no need to invent new BBS and routing software. For example distributing every message to all nodes avoids the need of any routing scheme but severely limits the size of the net and/or the number of messages. As long as you transmit 10 bytes now and 15 bytes then, this is no problem. But if you want to do anything substantial, routing, data compression etc. will come up. Even if that is beyond the scope of this project at the moment, I would include provisions that will enable such extensions in the future.
See for example any usage in a disaster: Meshtastic would be a wonderful transport level but would be overwhelmed by 100 nodes within the net if every message is distributed to all nodes.
Alexander - I have no ability to influence the technology choices being applied to Meshtastic, such as what you're describing. I'm only observing the enthusiasm of the Meshtastic enthusiasts and some parallel evolution to the early days of Amateur Radio and Packet Radio. And, also my hope that Amateur Radio could provide a better system than our legacy Packet Radio networking / BBS given our greater capabilities such as more spectrum, higher power, knowledge of radio technology, etc.
Steve, thinking of address fields for sender and receiver would be a first step. Collecting messages so they can be compressed effectively would be another. Message routing like any Ethernet hub does would be another idea. But this might collide with the basic Meshtastic philosophy.
Mike - I think that is a great solution! At least the individual contributions will be protected on a daily basis, but is there an automated method to recreate OpenSource.radio Wiki? Can one start with a blank DocuWiki and "roll in" all of the daily snapshots to effectively recreate OpenSource.radio Wiki?
One of the bigger lessons I've experienced about online resources by individuals or small groups is (sometimes called) "Hit by a bus" planning.
Companies and (and large organizations that hire staff) handle this by paying people to manage such risks - create backups, migrate to new servers or services as needed, software updates, etc. But there is less rigor for non-corporate / non-organizational projects like OpenSource.radio Wiki.
But, things HAPPEN - illness or death, changes of circumstances such as hosting becomes expensive or free hosting is withdrawn, loss of interest, changes of club administration, passwords are lost, etc.
How MUCH "hit by a bus" planning is appropriate depends on the importance of the data, and I think the OpenSource.Radio Wiki is sufficiently important to take steps, such as you've done, to preserve the data if something were to happen to the primary site.
Anyone with read access to the Github repository can use the 2 included folders to clone OpenSource.Radio. Dokuwiki is a wiki system that doesn't use a database and only relies on plain text files stored in the filesystem. The only things that are missing are the files that include the change history and the user database. The reason why I don't make them public is that I have identified them to be PII and I can't publish them out of legal and ethical reasons.
So if I get hit by a bus or if someone is not happy with OpenSource.radio, anyone can build a clone of it in under an hour and make their own thing.
Your optimism is wonderful. Amateur radio has so much relevance as the gateway to discovery and knowledge of what is possible for scientific progress translating to human progress.
Your pride in citizenship of our country is shared here. I too feel blessed to have been born into this fragile experiment of democracy.
73
Greg Urbiel. KD8RV
Greg - Thank you for the kind words. Amateur Radio isn't the be-all-and-end-all, but much like understanding computer systems is increasingly important, I feel it's also important to understand radio technology, and Amateur Radio helps cultivate that knowledge and curiosity.
BBS and email for Meshtastic: I have the feeling that someone is mostly reinventing the wheel again: There have been mail and BBS systems for extremely narrow band channels before: I started with an 300 bps acoustic coupler in the 1980s. I would take a look at http://ftsc.org/
Alexander - No question adding BBS and email to Meshtastic IS reinventing the wheel the Amateur Radio Packet Radio BBS and email! But what is new is that Meshtastic does not require a license to get started (under the most liberal interpretation of use of these devices for license-exempt portions of spectrum). Two other factors I've noted in effect for popularizing Meshtastic is that the Meshtastic devices are pretty cheap - under $100, and the self-education / promotion is very strong on Social Media - YouTube, Facebook, etc. It is easy to get interested, plug into an online community, and buy your first device. Contrast that to the comparatively complex process of getting interested in Amateur Radio, studying for the exam, taking the exam, registering with the FCC, figuring out Amateur Radio Packet Radio (or equivalents - New Packet Radio, VARA FM, CATS, etc. and the expense of buying a buying a modem for VHF or UHF radio, etc. AND... finding an Amateur Radio Packet Radio "community" in your area to actually be able to use the equipment. Meshtastic is a much lower barrier to entry, and low threshold of pain if you later turn out not to be impressed with Meshtastic or cannot find anyone in your area to communicate with.
Steve, you are looking into the wrong direction: I see no need to invent new BBS and routing software. For example distributing every message to all nodes avoids the need of any routing scheme but severely limits the size of the net and/or the number of messages. As long as you transmit 10 bytes now and 15 bytes then, this is no problem. But if you want to do anything substantial, routing, data compression etc. will come up. Even if that is beyond the scope of this project at the moment, I would include provisions that will enable such extensions in the future.
See for example any usage in a disaster: Meshtastic would be a wonderful transport level but would be overwhelmed by 100 nodes within the net if every message is distributed to all nodes.
Alexander - I have no ability to influence the technology choices being applied to Meshtastic, such as what you're describing. I'm only observing the enthusiasm of the Meshtastic enthusiasts and some parallel evolution to the early days of Amateur Radio and Packet Radio. And, also my hope that Amateur Radio could provide a better system than our legacy Packet Radio networking / BBS given our greater capabilities such as more spectrum, higher power, knowledge of radio technology, etc.
Steve, thinking of address fields for sender and receiver would be a first step. Collecting messages so they can be compressed effectively would be another. Message routing like any Ethernet hub does would be another idea. But this might collide with the basic Meshtastic philosophy.
Hi Steve,
thanks for this article on OpenSource.radio. You are absolutely right regarding the challenge of insuring "its survival as an information database". Please read here with the solution I came up with: https://dk1mi.radio/open-sourcing-opensourceradio/
I would be interested what you think about this.
73 de
Michael, DK1MI / N1BSD
Mike - I think that is a great solution! At least the individual contributions will be protected on a daily basis, but is there an automated method to recreate OpenSource.radio Wiki? Can one start with a blank DocuWiki and "roll in" all of the daily snapshots to effectively recreate OpenSource.radio Wiki?
One of the bigger lessons I've experienced about online resources by individuals or small groups is (sometimes called) "Hit by a bus" planning.
Companies and (and large organizations that hire staff) handle this by paying people to manage such risks - create backups, migrate to new servers or services as needed, software updates, etc. But there is less rigor for non-corporate / non-organizational projects like OpenSource.radio Wiki.
But, things HAPPEN - illness or death, changes of circumstances such as hosting becomes expensive or free hosting is withdrawn, loss of interest, changes of club administration, passwords are lost, etc.
How MUCH "hit by a bus" planning is appropriate depends on the importance of the data, and I think the OpenSource.Radio Wiki is sufficiently important to take steps, such as you've done, to preserve the data if something were to happen to the primary site.
Anyone with read access to the Github repository can use the 2 included folders to clone OpenSource.Radio. Dokuwiki is a wiki system that doesn't use a database and only relies on plain text files stored in the filesystem. The only things that are missing are the files that include the change history and the user database. The reason why I don't make them public is that I have identified them to be PII and I can't publish them out of legal and ethical reasons.
So if I get hit by a bus or if someone is not happy with OpenSource.radio, anyone can build a clone of it in under an hour and make their own thing.