Hi all,
Welcome to the community I have formed to discuss various communications technologies. I wanted to discuss some of the new comms and information systems I have been personally setting up and how I’ve integrated them all into what I like to call my “C2 at home” setup.
Most recently I’ve gotten into meahtastic radios, which if you are not aware are a really cool, relatively new, kind of mesh radio that enables text style chat and location sharing across devices without reliance of cell infrastructure. They are very cheap, usually under $50 per radio, and you don’t need a HAM license to operate them wich is great. I swept up a few T-Beams off of lilygo and have setup a small network to talk with friends.
Now what’s really neat about these radios is that they integrate with ATAK using a plugin, which has enabled us to utilize ATAK together as a team on phones without having to worry about cellular data or hotspots, and without needing to worry about getting a license like with the older hammer plugin strategy with baofengs. OpenTAKServer, a free TAK server, also implements a meshtastic gateway tool into their platform, which lets devices link together to a server over the meshtastic protocol. I’ve combined all of this to build a small meshtastic network, with a laptop based, portable TAK server which can be deployed and setup anywhere, and then give me and my group a decent communications network anywhere.
There are certainly still some limitations to the LoRa protocol that meshtastic is built on, but overall I think its a very neat tool for people to know about so I wanted to share my own usage of the tool and hopefully start a discussion here that we can all learn more from,
Thanks!
Very cool! I’ve been messing with meshtastic on and off but with no one else in range it gets a little boring 😕
Been meaning to test ATAK as well but too many hobbies and not enough time unfortunately
I was also looking into LoRaWAN for a higher data rate backbone/hub but haven’t made it to the point of obtaining any hardware yet.
Another thing I want to play with is some higher powered data stuff in the 2m/70cm bands once I get an all mode radio for those frequencies, HF is fun but not very fast 😂
That would be a pretty cool experiment. HF is one I would love to get into but alas I too am at capacity for hobbies. I would also like to try to up the bandwidth on my network but I think my plan is to use traditional 5GHz internet radios to build an IP based network to hopefully not need to re-invent the wheel too much. We’ll both get there one of these days!