251–260 of 353 posts
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> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings If you dont inherently know this fact then you should be grateful for a very lucky and priviliged life.
I don't live in America.
The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also. I'll tell you a story. Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah. This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to c…
but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?
Regarding the 'protocol for the waves,' you'll need to play with modulation. That’s the fun part. In technical literature, there are many well-defined modulations (like AFSK or FSK) with clear suggested applications for low-SNR environments.
As for Android support, I have no idea. I understand that in this thread, 'free' sounds like 'freedom,' but freedom has a cost. The freedom of communication requires investment: in hardware, software, and the time to learn the physics of the environment.
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but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?
To have an FM receiver work on a phone, you do need an antenna, the wired headphones serve that purpose perfectly. An FM transmitter is easy to find; you can use the simple 'Jack-to-FM' adapters designed for car radios, or much better, a USB SDR (which can range from a few kHz to GHz). Regarding the 'protocol for the waves,' you'll need to play with modulation. That’s the fun part. In technical literature, there are…
because the fun thing is cool, but people want some usable...
One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage. You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able…
I’ve read all the posts and, as the 'old man of the village', I would suggest taking a look at FidoNet. It was running 40 years ago, for more than a decade, before the internet was available to the average person. Store-and-forward, hierarchical organization, scheduled transmissions, working over dial-up and radio links, everything is there. There is nothing new to invent, and it was far more reliable than the 10m re…
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Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations). Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate. Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. ( https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-ope…
Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.co…
IMHO MT has a fundamental algorithmic flaw when it comes to dealing with very unreliable and lossy links.
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Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.
Walkie talkies as licensed today wouldn't because they are required by law to use exclusively stone-age radio technology. But modern unlicensed radio technology is incredibly good at sharing scarce 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Sometimes devices do interfere with each other, but they remain useful and they are far better at sharing than any expert would have predicted years ago. Let the radio engineers try.
There are tons of cool things society could enjoy if it wasn't for a small handful of shameless actors.
It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…
> Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. Is this even true? I still have two Gotennas from before they pivoted to military use cases, and they were legal to use both in the US and in Europe (on different bands auto-configured via GPS, as far as I remember). REI also currently stock…
It's getting movement in tough political environments like Uganda: https://www.archyde.com/bitchat-surges-to-1-in-uganda-amid-p... And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
seems like the second article is written by AI
It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…
Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.
In a true emergency, who can stop you from modifying that architecture? Once you treat the device as an independent radio node (using its DSP power to run custom modems) you can establish a mesh network with a range of several kilometers.
We have a '4x4 car in our pockets; we’ve just been conditioned to treat it like a toy.