Post #9833

I started looking at Meshtastic again yesterday during the rain. If you don't know what meshtastic is, it is a SMS messaging platform that works at 915mhz. It does not use cell towers and these little nodes all form a mesh to extend their range. These tend to work 10-12 miles person to person and I saw a boat in the keys ping thru a station in Miami FL, 55miles 88km away. These radios are usually 1/2w 500mW. You can go to 1w but at 1w you cannot use a really high gain antenna. Some of these units have keyboards and screens, others use your phone as an interface over BLE. But they do NOT use the cell phone network. These radios are about $25 for the radio. Naturally you can spend more money nad get equipment that lasts longer on a battery or is more suitable for unattended operation. Long long ago radio hams like myself created the APRS network. It used FM radios at 1200baud. The data encoding used a CRC checksum but no error correcting bits. It had problems with congestion and weak distant stations getting walked over. It was fun and kenwood made some purpose built 50w 2m/70cm radios for aprs. But it reached a point of stagnation. You can still see it at http://aprs.fi online. In the past several years, a french company patented a long range wide spectrum radio called LORA. These radios can recieve a signal below the noise floor just as you can keep up iwth a conversation from one person in a loud room. The radios are cheap and low powered. Some folks looked at APRS and these LORA radios and decided it was time to take a leap forward. They seem to have addressed many of the shortcomings that stagnated APRS 20 years ago, namely the radio side that doesn't have FM capture effect, Foward Error Correction built in and intelligent message routing. Also the messages are encrypted end to end which cannot happen under ham radio rules. This is a nonlicensed SMS network.