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!