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There is Mesh(core|tastic) around. Both use LoRa. With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive do
by NoiseBert69 9mo ago
There is Mesh(core|tastic) around. Both use LoRa.
With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors.
I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to <<15€. That's mass producable throw-away stuff.
Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.
- amelius 9mo agoI guess if you're protesting against the government, you don't have to comply with regulations and can use more power and basically the entire spectrum :)
- NoiseBert69 9mo agoBut better having the government shooting down your 10€ ballo.. node with a F-35 instead of a 50€ node.
- digiown 9mo agoIf you have the government as adversary and no military force to back it up, you might want to reconsider doing that as it makes you very detectable from far away.
- ajsnigrutin 9mo agoAnd instead of "just" getting teargassed and sent home, you get thrown to a concentration camp for organizing communications for the domestic terrorists there to overthrow the government, attack ICE, <insert whatever you want here, something you're pro- or against>.
- danesparza 9mo agoYou also make yourself a bright shining beacon to anybody looking for a resistance network because Lora operates on very specific frequencies. It would be easy to spot you with an RF scanner.
- NoiseBert69 9mo agoSemtech LoRa Modems are wide frequency range modems. Latest generation also supports (non-LoRa) frequency hopping. The signals are difficult to spot once you are in some distance to the transmitter.
- ActorNightly 9mo agoIf the place you are at is at that point in the conflict, RF scanners are the least of your worries.
- nine_k 9mo agoObviously, put that relay node on a hill, on some structure where you don't live. Or maybe on the roof of your tall apartment building, among all the satellite dishes and their associated boxes. Pretend to be one of those. If it's a self-contained, solar-powered node, it needs not be next to you, or to anyone. It should be safe and secure, to be of use during a natural disaster, or an outburst of violence.
- vrighter 9mo agoUntil you actually need to use it. You need to get the data you want to transmit over to it. Where you'll either have another transmitter at your location. A cable snaking back to your location. Or a directional antenna pointed at your location. Unless you plan to manually go up the hill with a flash drive each time.
- tastyfreeze 9mo agoAny licensed wireless networking gear is going to operate in very specific frequencies. The government requires it! If we were going for "the best" gear for avoiding detection you would have frequency hopping with jumps far enough apart that a listener has a harder time pinpointing a transmitter. Making repeaters roving makes it even harder for your adversary.
- sneak 9mo agoMeshtastic citywide nets use a single frequency. Jamming it is trivial.
- exitb 9mo agoEven more trivial to flood with garbage traffic, as the whole network will amplify your attack.
- kaitocross 9mo agoLoRa locally is often installed/managed by municipal governments.
- NoiseBert69 9mo agoIt's mostly LoRaWAN which is great for very-low-rate telemetry and very simple control tasks.