Three Meshtastic nodes are active in Cape Town for off-grid communications during disasters or just to meet your neighbours
Myself and two other ham radio operators have established 3 Meshtastic nodes that will operate 24/7 to help build out more connectivity across Cape Town.
We are using license-free 868 MHz radios, so anyone can buy these cheap (ish) devices and ge ...continues
@Linux_in_a_Bit I'll have a look then a bit deeper thanks. Am already struggling to just get people to join on Meshtastic nodes though. I'm really not sure if something unknown is going to adopted any quicker. LoRa also was supposedly very lightweight on bandwidth. But let me first dive deeper into this one.
@Linux_in_a_Bit yes it may be early days still. Thing is we're looking at a radio only solution, so we are still bound by the 1% or so duty cycle. We need it to be Internet free so what we have in the LoRa restrictions, is what we're working with.
@danie10
I believe I mentioned that Reticulum handles LoRa's limitations better as well: https://linuxrocks.online/
(just in case it got lost bc Mastodon issues)
@Linux_in_a_Bit I see the benefits of more functions to use, but I still cannot understand how video or file transfer can legally work in the EU where the permitted duty cycle is only 1% on 868 MHz? That is an allowable time of 36 secs every hour. It can surely only be used for basic short text?
@danie10
You're probably not gonna do file transfer over LoRa because it would take wayyy longer than dialup internet.
You can, but that doesn't mean you would want to...
I'm talking things like NomadNet pages or similar mostly.
Those still take a hot minute, but it's at least usable.
Of course you can use other higher bandwidth physical layers to achieve faster speeds.
Reticulum is designed to be highly versatile in this reguard as well.
@danie10
Reticulum is dealing with the same bandwidth limits as Meshtastic, but Reticulum can make much more of that bandwidth actually usable, especially with larger networks, because of how it routes traffic (for reference Meshtastic uses flood routing): https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/422#discussioncomment-8163253
The approach is further explained in the "Understanding Reticulum" section of the docs which I linked earlier.
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