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It runs independently of internet and power. One use case is a group of people in a remote area (hikers, hunters) carrying their own node and being able to communicate via text over several kilometres.
Or you just use iPhone satellite messaging without relying on extra devices that may not even work in mountains
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You ca…
So you have the mesh and then what? Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means? What is the use case?
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Its one of the few places you can be fairly sure you're chatting to people, not bots, who have no agenda to sell you anything. Of course if it ever becomes popular, that will quickly change. But for now it is like early IRC.
No one has once ever spoken to me on it.
Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning.
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You ca…
So you have the mesh and then what? Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means? What is the use case?
More info here if someone's interested: https://www.civtak.org/
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People forget that this network isnt for everyday use. It is for use in ad-hoc scenarios where cell or even satellite coverage falls apart. The most powerful aspect is that these things are deployable . A communication chain can be established as fast as people can move. Natural disasters are the most obvious use case, but more interesting are things like search and rescue. Go somewhere properly remote such as the hi…
The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that. Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.
I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.
With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.
If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.