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!
I’ve been using APRS with ham radio for quite some time, and was pretty excited when I found out about meshtastic last month. After I picked up a couple of nodes, I was surprised at how many are in my area. The low price point and no licensing requirements makes it easy to get friends involved. I’m putting together a couple of ~$25 solar nodes to stick on the top of a couple nearby mountains to vastly extend the reach of the local network.
Do you know of any meshtastic communities on lemmy? I just joined today and am still trying to find my way around…
What would you recommend for someone first getting into Meshtastic?
My recommendation is to get a couple lilygo T-Beams to start out experimenting. The Heltec radios are also pretty good but require a bit more DIY-ing to get them to the same level of functionality. The T-Beams are cheap, and include GPS, wifi and serial support all in a pretty good bundle. Pair with an old android phone and you’ll be rolling
I have a couple t-beams and some wisblock based nodes as well. I would recommend the wisblock over the tbeams because you’ll get much much better battery life and a more compact package.
The downside is you’ll have to build it out to some extent - wisblock system is designed to be very adaptable so there’s lots of options. But all you’d need to get started is a battery, antenna, and the meshtastic kit
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!
Explain meshtastic for someone who’s not familiar with comm/radio technology
Basically meshtastic is a widely available system used to send location data and texts between a local network of devices. This allows for texting and location sharing between people within a group without reliance on infrastructure like cell towers or wifi, so basically you can text and see your friends on a map without service. It’s pretty widely available across a few different devices from different manufacturers and you basically just need the device, and a phone to connect it to in order to get up a running.
End to end encryption capabilities?
Its the built in standard. And recently was upgraded to be even more secure
greatly appreciated, ig this will be my chance to jump into comms autism
Got two Heltec V3 boards last week, still trying to figure things out. My goal is to setup a mains node at primary residence, then a mobile node to test distances.
My city has a network setup on “medium fast”, IRL meetups etc. the new heltec v4 came out which looks like a poor man’s station g2 a little in that it has an amp that brings it up to or exceeding the FCC limits depending on antenna configuration. Might be a good choice for those in outer suburbs. You really have to mount these things as high as humanly possible, often RAK units in trees to send messages reliably.
I really think we need to keep pushing on this front, the world is turning more and more authoritarian so any tool possible setup ahead of time is good for freedom.
Looking forward to learning more.
I bought a couple cheap ones this summer. Haven’t messed with them yet. If you got any good links for the noob post them up.
