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Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

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Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#31

Post by bb88 »

States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.

If you're going the radio route these come to mind:

Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.

Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.

WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.

Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#33

Post by badc0ffee »

_moof wrote: post #28
badc0ffee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to think for a second to realize that HF means lower frequency than VHF, not high frequency in an absolute sense.

It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!

Reminds me of High Speed USB.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#34

Post by Gigachad »

wiml wrote: post #25
Gigachad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually work though? My experience with Meshtastic is it’s so difficult to get a message delivered beyond the nearest hop that it’s almost useless. And Bluetooth has a significantly shorter range than LoRa.

The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though. For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar…

I’ve tried MeshCore as well and discovered zero nodes. At least what I’ve seen it looks like Meshtastic implemented the same routing fixes MeshCore has.

I think the issue is more that getting a message many kilometres out using a couple of nodes sitting in non prime locations is just unreliable. The noise is too high. There’s also a limit on how many messages can be sent while using flood routing.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#37

Post by themafia »

tekla wrote: post #18
quietsegfault wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think amateur radio does? Why do you think that broadcasting your location, and that you're looking to get information from somewhere other than the approved sources will end up in anything other than tragedy? What information do you think could reliably be provided with amateur radio in a situation like this?

The OP wanted a way to bypass a internet shutdown, not a perfect solution. And you know, I'm fairly sure being able to talk to the outside world makes it so that you can at least get information out to others. Pray tell, what methods do YOU have to bypass a shutdown with privacy and no reliance on ISP and resistant to jamming?

> so that you can at least get information out to others.

So they can do what with it? The people who can action it already have intensive satellite imagery of the area and domestic intelligence assets. The level of risk to reward for a citizen to do this is fairly low.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#38

Post by MarsIronPI »

wiml wrote: post #25
Gigachad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually work though? My experience with Meshtastic is it’s so difficult to get a message delivered beyond the nearest hop that it’s almost useless. And Bluetooth has a significantly shorter range than LoRa.

The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though. For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar…

Out of curiosity, how to Meshtastic and Meshcore compare to Reticulum?
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