Is that an Espressif logo in the photo? I'm seriously impressed with their products. To me, they are like the Toyota of microcontrollers, specially after having to throw in the trash an Arduino Giga that never worked and not only was expensive on itself but also required me to purchase those dicey JTAG devices with an impossible to find plug and a heavy authenticity problem. A bit in dismay, I need to admit this is another "Chinese make'em better".
BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
151–160 of 168 posts
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood the popularity of these protocols, because when I looked at the legal duty cycles and multiplied that by time in a day and instantaneous bitrate, the result was a disappointing amount of data per day... So many spectrum rules are totally weird though: should they be interpreted per radio device? or per user? What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices…
Meshtastic routing is also completely broken.
> Meshtastic routing is also completely broken.
I am curious about that.
What is in particular broken ?
Any reason why Meshtastic is not using a well specified / tested a mesh aware routing protocol like BATMAN [1] ?
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meshtastic routing is also completely broken.
> Meshtastic routing is also completely broken. I am curious about that. What is in particular broken ? Any reason why Meshtastic is not using a well specified / tested a mesh aware routing protocol like BATMAN [1] ? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N .
I suspect protocols like B.A.T.M.A.N. would consume all available LoRa airtime just with neighbor discovery. On Meshtastic, nodes announcing their presence more than once per hour is seen as unnecessarily talkative.
I also don't think it's possible to make Meshtastic into the kind of reliable and high-performance mesh network some users want without effectively dropping support for most battery-powered devices by requiring much more frequent transmissions to maintain connectivity and participation in the mesh.
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices in parallel and alternate each radio so none of the radios exceed their allowed transmit duty cycle? Folks with badges knocking on the user’s door. It is pretty trivial to locate stationary signals.
The point they are making is that if the limit is _per device_ than using 10 devices doesn't break the rules.
The FCC or whoever is almost 100% just looking at power/time/location. Those 10 devices will look like 1 device.
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
How remote is "remote"? If you're talking about a few miles/KMs between nodes, plain old LoRaWAN might be more than sufficient, esp. for the sensor use case. The nice thing about using LoRaWAN is that's it's literally providing an IPv6 overlay so you can run e.g. MQTT or a text-based messaging protocol designed for regular TCP/IP use. UDP is preferable to avoid frequent session resets and keepalive traffic chewing up…
Is there any implementation of the store and forward for mobile nodes? From what I recall, meshcore de duplication only tracks like the last 256 messages so that could quickly fail to de duplicate.
Meshtastic supports store and forward for ESP32 nodes that have a few MB of RAM, but not for the nRF52 devices that can't practically buffer much. I've only used the latter class of devices, so I don't have any experience with how well Meshtastic's store and forward works in practice.
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood the popularity of these protocols, because when I looked at the legal duty cycles and multiplied that by time in a day and instantaneous bitrate, the result was a disappointing amount of data per day... So many spectrum rules are totally weird though: should they be interpreted per radio device? or per user? What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices…
These things aren't "Internet Access", they're an easy way to get service that is bandwidth-equivalent to SMS, MMS, IRC or walkie talkie, over complex and distant terrain, without any central coordinating authority. Potentially even acting as last-mile to repeater nodes that pass through the actual Internet. This is a terrifically useful idea of a network in certain conditions, though in other conditions it's probabl…
I didn't assume "internet access", even for machine 2 machine applications, it was a disappointingly low bandwidth.
I don't deny a niche of applications, I tried to understand its popularity, and back then I came to the conclusion it was probably illicit use of the technology, not conformant use.
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point they are making is that if the limit is _per device_ than using 10 devices doesn't break the rules.
The FCC or whoever is almost 100% just looking at power/time/location. Those 10 devices will look like 1 device.
when would the 10 radios be sufficiently spaced to count as separate devices?
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what’s the real solution for when Starlink is too expensive and too high power? I really want to solution for remote mountaineering communication that’s not just GMRS. And what about remote weather sensors? I really don’t need a full internet connection just to send a tiny payload every 5 minutes. Meshtastic should be the obvious answer for this but in my limited experience the app(s) and code are buggy on even th…
How remote is "remote"? If you're talking about a few miles/KMs between nodes, plain old LoRaWAN might be more than sufficient, esp. for the sensor use case. The nice thing about using LoRaWAN is that's it's literally providing an IPv6 overlay so you can run e.g. MQTT or a text-based messaging protocol designed for regular TCP/IP use. UDP is preferable to avoid frequent session resets and keepalive traffic chewing up…
LoRaWAN seems interesting but the documentation and availability of is either "Crypto hobby project from Seedstudio" or "Strange telecom companies selling $900 base stations that still expect an internet connection (for licensing?)". Maybe I'm missing something but the LoRaWAN doesn't see to sell itself very well when half the vendors are behind "Contact for quote" pages.
Of course, for real emergencies I have a Garmin SOS device. It would just be "nice" to have something for local 2-5 km communication that doesn't need a clear view of sky, works partially underground, etc. GMRS is "fine" but from a physics perspective a digital signal with Chirp encoding should go further and be more reliable.
Seems like JS8Call or Packet radio might more in line with what I want. It's just surprising that something like Meshtastic hasn't replaced them.
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
How remote is "remote"? If you're talking about a few miles/KMs between nodes, plain old LoRaWAN might be more than sufficient, esp. for the sensor use case. The nice thing about using LoRaWAN is that's it's literally providing an IPv6 overlay so you can run e.g. MQTT or a text-based messaging protocol designed for regular TCP/IP use. UDP is preferable to avoid frequent session resets and keepalive traffic chewing up…
LoRaWAN seems interesting but the documentation and availability of is either "Crypto hobby project from Seedstudio" or "Strange telecom companies selling $900 base stations that still expect an internet connection (for licensing?)". Maybe I'm missing something but the LoRaWAN doesn't see to sell itself very well when half the vendors are behind "Contact for quote" pages. Of course, for real emergencies I have a Garm…
You said it yourself:
> Of course, for real emergencies I have a Garmin SOS device.
that's why the mesh radio/LoRaWAN-type ecosystems suck. I don't mean to be rude or snarky; just to point out a very contextually-relevant example against your argument.
For the average consumer who needs this functionality seriously, there's a proprietary (and often costly) solution. Subtract those mission-critical-remote-comms devices and you're left with hobbyist needs, so you get hobbyist-quality ecosystems.
Re: BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
6 miles seems a very optimistic estimation: 2.4Ghz propagation is very reduced by obstacles like buildings or trees and at that frequency the atmospheric water (fog, rain, humidity) have a big impact on propagation. And you need also to consider that 2.4Ghz is a very polluted band, then the noise floor is significatevly higher than in the 865/915 Mhz. Moreover at 2.4Ghz the Fresnel window is smaller and the risk of m…
> 2.4Ghz propagation is very reduced by obstacles like buildings I never did much 2.4ghz stuff because that was what rich people did, or people mad enough to modify microwave oven magnetrons. However I was always under the impression that freespace loss on 2.4 was terrible. but it turns out its "only" ~9db more than 865
Worth mentioning that 2.4GHz has a lot more attenuation due to clutter than 900MHz. Your problem is usually buildings and non line of site transmission paths. When the signal has to pass through and bounce off things your link budget takes a big hit.
There is the idea of the path loss exponent. In a vacuum it's 2.0. 900Mhz with clutter it's -2.5 At 2.4 MHz it's -3 and -5.8 it's -3.5.
Other downside for higher spreading factor spectrum is data rate drops which results in longer packets. Longer packets means more energy per packet and a higher chance someone else will blow your packet out of the water.
You've been able to buy 900 and 2.4GHz transceivers for the last 20 years.