Yup! Meshtastic makes a lot of sense for a whole range of use cases. I am also a festival goer and having text comms can be very useful in those circumstances.
For their size the T1000-E's are impressive, I think for many people they are the most practical EDC but folks will often have something else as a base station on their roof.
It would be very cool if someone were to release a mobile phone with LoRa built in.
Welcome! I'm a n00b but I'm having fun so far, and I'm interested in the responses you get here as I'm learning as I go!
I am very keen on standalone devices that don't need a phone to function but haven't explored that functionality as yet. I got a bunch of T1000-E's for giving to local friends to test with and as an EDC, and a Station G2 as a home base station (haven't got a keyboard for it yet but with that it becomes standalone with the canned message module). The T1000-E is super easy to set up and good to demo to people who aren't too techy that might be interested. The station g2 needs more power but comes with a pretty good stock antenna. I've ordered a couple of the SenseCAP Indicators (currently backordered) as they look like they miiight be standalone(?) with the advanced firmware which doesn't have a release date yet, and look fun even if not.
We only have a small mesh of 3 in our little town but my two friends are both into radio and way more experienced than me, and I think they are both impressed with the ease of use, and one is super keen and going to get a Station G2 as he can use it for HAM stuff too as he is licensed.
Yes please! More of this sort of thing!
Best case scenario frankly is minority govt with greens holding balance of power. Much more chance of getting better legislation passed when greens have to be listened to.
I'm encouraging every little one of us to stop sending money to US companies wherever possible. People here already are likely to be less dependent on US digital services, but pay attention. Support Fedi servers in AU or EU. Kick big tech to the curb. Think about where stuff comes from. There's some things very hard to give up but people can live quite fine without Bezos Musk and Zuckerberg. Fuck all of them.
While it's not the mainstream, it's not everyone that constantly wants more. There are many religious orders that practise asceticism, voluntary simplicity, and other behaviours which are not growth focused. Minimalism as a movement in western society is genuine. People do sometimes reach a point where they stop being seduced by consumerism, realising it doesn't bring the happiness it falsely promises.
I tried to do EC (elimination communication) but wasn't super successful, but it did mean my daughter was very used to sitting on a mini potty regularly well before we did "proper" potty training with big potty. About a month before 2nd birthday got a book about potty training from the library, and then spent a weekend pants free, and she got it very quickly. Got poops a lot faster than pee though, she only had maybe 2 poops in a nappy after her 2nd birthday, but I had to keep putting nappies on for longer drives or trips because she just wouldn't tell me she needed to pee. She was pretty much fully toilet trained by 3, but has had a couple of accidents, 2 bed wetting one end of day at childcare. Not sure about those but not too worried about it.
Good suggestion but no active churches no, and very small ex-church that I'm aware of in a, non particularly high location. We would need to be getting nodes ideally at the top of hills and there are quite a few!
I took two international trips with my now 3yo, one to Thailand and one to Bali, when she was one 1/4 and one 3/4. She was pretty happy both trips except some of the longer flights. I decided not to do longer flights while she is toddler age, so we have only done domestic trips this past year, and fortunately she has been pretty good, but I do centre everything around her, and I'm a single parent. I'm waiting till she is probably or 5 for anything longer now, and can recommend the book Hunt Gather Parent for general parenting advice, though the style is a bit annoying I think a lot of the advice is sound.
The T1000-E is a truly impressively designed piece of kit. I feel like so much I've been into when on bleeding edge is janky or too easy to break, these are solid.
Christopher Alexander is brilliant. Regularly return to A Pattern Language, so much inspiration.
The T1000-E is a truly impressively designed piece of kit. I feel like so much I've been into when on bleeding edge is janky or too easy to break, these are solid.
That's very helpful, thankyou! I am still working out the different modes and we're just leaving everything as client at this point but good to know for when we get busier!
Yes for emergency services radio is probably better, but have had the conversation that those bands get very busy when there is actually an emergency, and unless you're directly involved in the emergency response it's better to keep quiet even if you have the devices. To keep everyone else in the loop a mesh would be really helpful and allows for direct comms between people without radio knowledge. I've done enough radio stuff at festivals to know it's a bit daunting for beginners. But these days pretty much everyone, even your grandma, has a cell phone and most understand apps and text messages. So the learning curve is pretty small.
Keen on Reticulum, but my focus atm is Meshtastic because of the ease of use, both Android and iPhone are dead easy to set up in less than 2 minutes and my use case is for more local nodes in most cases that would be with people with minimal technical skills.
That's great you have a node high up, I would love to do that here but not sure where it might be practical to do. What kind of tower is the 200 feet one?
I'm in the middle of the 400 and 200 meter people, they are in opposite directions. I was thinking the Station G2 would be good on the roof of the highest house to extend the mesh further but if no one else interested then I was going to do it on mine, which isn't ideal but would have pretty good reach in one direction, but I'm fairly encouraged with the experiments so far. We get bushwalkers and campers & 4wders up in this area all the time so am expecting to see occasional nodes pop up temporarily if Meshtastic really takes off.
Thanks about the suggestion to try Long Slow, I decided to keep on the default of LongFast at least initially, due to potential for visitors to the region with nodes.
My mesh beginnings
So I was interested in mesh comms years ago. Serval mesh and other wifi meshes were of interest, but never seemed to actually... work.
Then I got a couple of Gotennas. Used them once at a festival and then they went in a box.
Got them out about a year ago and tried to use them, discovered the company who made them decided to stop support for the common plebs who got them kickstarted, and now only do commercial / military apps. Greeeat. Look into HAM radio for the APRS, but hear from a friend that used to do it that in our country it's a higher level license to do any data, lot of expense and time, and thus there were few people actually doing it, so decide not to go that route. They mention Meshtastic briefly.
Skip forward and see a mention of the T1000-E... yes, I think this is the solution. Buy 4, and then a few days later see mention of the Station G2. Buy one.
They arrive and I get them set up and have a tinker... now it's time to start telling other people and ask if they can help me test.
I live in a really small rural town of 300 people at 500m on a sortof plateau (small gradients around town) in a mountainous region, couple of hours from a major city. The power fairly regularly goes out, usually from trees dropping power lines in heavy wind, and this is only going to get worse with climate change. Power out means no broadband. If the power is out more than a few hours, no cell connection either (which isn't great to begin with). So here is a clear use case for local comms in emergencies a few times a year at least.
So I contact two local friends and ask if they would be interested in testing a new radio mesh thing. Unbeknownst to me, BOTH of them actually have experience in HAM / CB radio.
They both are keen to have a play and I give the first a T1000-E a few days back, and with a bit of trial and error, we get a stable connection between our houses that are about 400m apart. This is without even getting antennas on roofs. Then yesterday other friend comes over and I give them a T1000-E and he pops back home - only about 200m to his place. Easy connection, no issues. Other friend is away during the day but I announce on LongFast that we have grown the mesh, but I go to sleep before he gets back.
I wake up this morning to find a smatter of conversation between them after I went to bed, and this is my favourite comment:
"I look at the s/n ratios and think it's impossible, but it works. Some very clever design and tech."
😀
So hopefully, we will get more people interested and even potentially a connection to two other towns nearby. Both have significant hills in the way and one is in a twisty windy valley, so we'll need to get creative or maybe need to set up private mqtt server to relay between key nodes but aware that won't be useful in emergency situation with no internet/cell data, but we're learning as we go: I'm happy to have two people on board with more experience than me too.
#meshtastic
It might be small biccies compared to iron ore to China, but the optics are really bad, and when Australia is included in the tariffs, then psychologically we are siding with Everyone Else in this new US vs Democracy fight. Because that's what the US (tech bros, who are now in charge) are orchestrating: a direct attack on democracy.
So yes, the numbers are small compared to other countries, but the attack is ideological, and real.