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Meshtastic long range radio systems. Off grid, user created, low bit rate but stupid long range.
Sweet I'm pretty inexperienced with radio stuff but I've been meaning to look into that for a while. Time to hop down the rabbit hole!
It's just the right amount of DIY to be engaging and so cheap to get into. Plus the discord community is really active.
Plus the discord community is really active.
<triggered>
This is the first time I've heard about this; seems so cool! Any ideas which radios I should be looking at?
Get on the notification list for a RAK starter kit. I have heltec and RAK, and the NRF chip outperforms the ESP32 based ones by leaps. Barely uses any battery. Just check which frequency you need for your country. I'm in NA so we use 915 MHz
You a ham? Or is this LoRa? APRS?
This is LoRa but there's heavy crossover with the HAM community.
Cool. I got licensed just before the pandemic, I've played with APRS a bit but never LoRa
IIRC, some hardware can be switched into a HAM mode, letting it transmit at higher wattage, at the cost of zero encryption for legal compliance.
i like those
I placed my order for some radios to play with 3 days ago. Im unreasonably excited for them to arrive.
I'm in thr US and had to order mine from Aliexpress. Those were some long weeks of waiting.
It doesn't help that i orderd it on the 2nd day of Chinese new year, so i wont see any action for at least a week.
That's fascinating. I just picked up my first 10M radio, can you elaborate a bit?
I'm not much of an expert but it's basically low power UHF radios that use a particular waveform and FFT process to decode signals that are well below background noise. My radio regularly picks up messages with an SNR -10. I like it to the GPS system's algorithms.
The main drawback is that, because they're low power, you have to have LOS between antennas.
How did you learn to not fuck up? I heard if you interfere with important radio frequencies (airplanes I think) you'll get punished by the law.
Edit: I looked into transceivers at one point and saw that mentioned.
They operate in bands intended for stuff like LoRa and IoT. So there's no danger of messing with other systems.
Like ham radio bounce off the ionosphere over the horizon long range?
Not that far. Most LoRa systems use UHF bands so you need LoS to get these super low powered radios to work.
Lmaoooo, was going to say the same thing. Fantastic project that has me hooked.