4 ms·

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

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?

fiskeben 6mo ago
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.
- wang_li 6mo ago
  v. a satellite enabled phone that can send text messages over thousands of kilometers? These people should not be making a short range text solution, they should be building a low bandwidth internet extension with gateways to the real internet. Most of the information content of the internet can readily fit over 56kb lines once you strip out all the fluff. And in an emergency where you need or want a decentralized mesh network, that's more important that being able to text, who exactly?
- para_parolu 6mo ago
  Or you just use iPhone satellite messaging without relying on extra devices that may not even work in mountains
  - mplewis 6mo ago
    This won't reliably get messages between two users in the mountains.
    - LastTrain 5mo ago
      Neither will Meshtastic!
  - davidkwast 5mo ago
    You can use both. In the mountains I would appreciate redundancy.
- fodkodrasz 6mo ago
  A PMR or DMR radio can also do that. And is cheaper and user friendlier.
  - firesteelrain 5mo ago
    DMR without needing the site to setup your ID etc?
    - fodkodrasz 5mo ago
      might have mixed it up with dPMR, HAMs have lots of overlapping similar stuff... and love gatekeeping. Nevertheless IMO the mentioned demographics/use-cases want something turnkey ready, ~single button, and currently LORA based stuff is not like that, and is clumsier and needs a certain level of... tinkerer mindset, compared to a commercial license free radio system (which might have been set up with a minimal effort), where learning curve is basically volume knob and PTT button. I have handed out simple FM radios for total tech-illiterate people (mothers, children, elderly physical workers) in an outdoor event with 0 cell coverage, and comms worked perfectly over the dozen square kilometer area. Biggest incident was a lost radio handset.
      - firesteelrain 5mo ago
        I was more pointing out the irony that DMR is being promoted which requires centralization. Also, DMR isn’t all about Ham Radio. It is used commercially.
2ndorderthought 6mo ago
It's not all people trying to skirt the law. It's kind of like HAM radio as a hobby. It's fun technology that lets people do cool automation projects and sure with a mesh connect to other people. Imagine you have a few acres of land and want to turn on sprinklers or something. A lot of people use it just to chat with friends and family in a fun way. Of course the preppers and privacy evangelists see it as a means to get ready for living in a hostile environment. Being fair to them, things don't look awesome in the US. I bet a few criminals use it, but it's still very niche.
Cyan488 6mo ago
Just like ham radio, it's a an interesting technical hobby for those that may get excited when their little 0.25W radio hits a repeater 80km away. More practically, I'm going to try it out while camping this summer. In areas with low or no cell coverage, my phone is useless or dies quickly. Throw a repeater in a tree, and hand your friends nodes.
laurowyn 6mo ago
> What is the use case? It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate. Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep. The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times. Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.
- repelsteeltje 6mo ago
  Some scary applications come to mind. For instance, sprinkling a bunch of nodes + sensors in hostile territory should allow for gathering intelligence, guiding drones, setting of fuses...
  - pohl 6mo ago
    ...but also resistance in the context of authoritarian capture.
  - ungreased0675 6mo ago
    Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network. Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.
    - thadt 6mo ago
      That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…
  - willis936 6mo ago
    Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.
tomjen3 6mo ago
Being nerdy. But also you don’t build these things when you need them (it will be too late), you need to build them before you need them.
srmatto 6mo ago
Digital Radio Hobbying, think HAM radio but with a microcontroller and apps.
dmd 6mo ago
If you see this technology and think "wow! that solves [problem I already have]" - then it's great. Otherwise, you buy a couple, set them up, spend a week or two sending very slow and unreliably forwarded messages that mostly amount to "hi! i have an ACME 32ABC radio! What do you have?", and then put it in a drawer or sell it on. Just like ham radio, really.
nsxwolf 6mo ago
I built one and found absolutely no use for it. No one ever, and I mean ever, answers you. It's sort of like ham radio, where you get your technician license and get on a net and discover people are just talking about their antennas. Except it's worse, because all the antenna discussions are happening on Reddit and Discord and not on the network itself. People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".
- Melatonic 6mo ago
  HAM I think used to be more popular when it didnt have all this competition and it makes total sense
- devilbunny 6mo ago
  The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.
qmr 6mo ago
The use case is off grid communications for whatever you might need. 95% of it is people just doing ping? Pong! In chat. The cheapest devices are like $10. Order one and have a go.
randerson 6mo ago
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.
- nsxwolf 6mo ago
  No one has once ever spoken to me on it.
  - LastTrain 5mo ago
    Even if someone did, you’d only get every 10th message.
brk 6mo ago
There is no real use case, IMO. I setup a few nodes a couple of months ago. It's mostly no activity, punctuated by some random "can you read me" type messages, and for some unknown reason people who think there is something impressive about them having a node on a commercial flight. The entire thing would fall over in any kind of scenario where you needed to rely on this janky mesh network as a primary means of communications. It can be fun/useful for very out of the way things where you have a handful of people out camping, or other off-grid situations. But frankly even in those cases there are far better/established ways to keep in sync if you need to (eg: FRS). This stuff is mostly a solution looking for a problem.
TheSkyHasEyes 6mo ago
> What is the use case? I worked R&D on LoRa project a few years ago. Their use case was a long-range emergency communication system for workers in remote areas(no wifi, lte or LEO at that time). Now I see a bunch of applications in this field that aren't what you describe. :)
derekenos 6mo ago
I set up my first node after the last major Verizon outage that rendered my cell phone useless as a mobile communications device. Now, when the next outage happens, with the always-on base station that I have at home, I can bring a portable Meshtastic radio out with me, paired to my phone via Bluetooth, and retain the ability communicate wirelessly back home, or with any of the other many nodes in the extensive network here in the NYC / Hudson Valley region. I also enticed a couple of local friends to install them and we often opt to text over the mesh. I see it as a thing that is fun to play around with now, but which may become critical at some point in the future.
- alterom 6mo ago
  Like HAM radio: nobody needs it, until a real emergency strikes. Then everyone does.
  - imp0cat 6mo ago
    Except the bandwidth just isn't there.
    - alterom 5mo ago
      There's not much bandwidth in HAM radio either. Any bandwidth is better than zero.
cheema33 6mo ago
I would love to be able to get text alerts when an event occurs, from a location that is not connected to the Internet, about a mile away. The need is not critical, so there is no desire to spend money every month. And reliability of the solution does not have to be high either. Something like this might work?
- nohup2 6mo ago
  Yes.
terabyterex 6mo ago
hiking with so far you don't have cell access. cruises when you don't have cell access.
wolvoleo 6mo ago
It's really for closed user groups. At least meshtastic doesn't allow you to see other people's messages, only those in your own group. They're all encrypted.
goody71 6mo ago
I've seen it used by folks off-roading/overlanding for coms. Gov/DoD/SpecOps use it to maintain radio connectivity with things like the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK).
chabes 6mo ago
People will go on and on about what happens to society when the internet or cell service goes offline, but when they see an emergency solution staring them directly in the face, they wonder what the use case is.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
"What is the use case?" Advertising services But only if use of the network becomes popular (Generally no one thought this would be the eventual use case for the internet)
- VLM 5mo ago
  Unlike ham radio, it allows encryption and doesn't forbid commercial use, so it'll get taken over by commercial interests if it works, or ignored if it remains small or fails. If it works the pioneers will get wiped out and removed from the network...
mrandish 6mo ago
I used to wonder the same thing and then we bought a vacation home and experienced no cell service in an area close to a major metro. It's only a 40 min highway drive outside a top 20 U.S. big city. Our street is only 12 mins drive from a major interstate highway with the usual suburban superstore sprawl (Target, WalMart, Home Depot, Costco) so it feels like we're in the middle of 'civilization'. But once you turn off the highway, that last 12 mins gets both beautiful (with rugged hills) and also very empty. Five mins from our house suddenly cell service from all the providers gets very spotty. If you live near the top of a hill facing the right direction, you can maybe jury rig a cellular antenna on a pole. There is legacy POTS phone service via 60 year-old copper but few use it because it's only ISDN barely faster than dial-up and >$100/mo. Otherwise, there was no option for reliable residential phone/data/text service until Starlink became available in our area a couple years ago. So everyone in our entire area has 2M radios to communicate in emergencies because in four years we've had two fires come close enough to close our roads, been snowed in twice (without power) and a small bridge got damaged in flooding blocking vehicle access in and out for four days. We can't even see any of our neighbor's houses from our property yet several times a year we need to get extremely local information from, and coordinate with, people we'd have to hike to visit. And it's usually because something is happening which takes out local power and/or road access. But the old 2M radios have to be monitored in a real-time which feels really antiquated. So, to me, inexpensive LoRa that could enable store-and-forward messaging and conditional unattended alerts suddenly sounds very useful.
filcuk 6mo ago
I'm using one of those devices with a tiny eink screen... as a pocket ebook reader. Sorry for the bait. Fun and easy project though, lookup Pala one if you're interested and dm me for improved firmware (restrictive license)
- Melatonic 6mo ago
  Sounds intriguing. How is the battery life? Color e-ink or BW? Would be great if it also ran some type of Topo mapping software!
  - filcuk 6mo ago
    BW. I don't think colour would do much, as the screen is 250x122. Battery may depend on what you can find, but the one I have should last several weeks (still testing). I started on a tiny LiPo I ripped from my cat's floppy fish toy. To give more info here, it uses Heltec Wireless Paper, which is a self-contained unit and just needs a battery added.
the_gipsy 6mo ago
You send "test" and hope that someone replies. Sometimes you discuss new Meshtastic gear or setting up a router together.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ww520 5mo ago
LoRa is for long range lower power communication. It can achieve a range of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in practical conditions and up to 330 kilometers (210 miles) in perfect conditions. There are plenty of applications for it.
maxgashkov 5mo ago
One of the use cases is pairing it up with ATAK or similar tactical awareness system during SAR operations by volunteer brigades in remote areas with spotty coverage by regular networks. More info here if someone's interested: https://www.civtak.org/ https://www.civtak.org/
ingohelpinger 5mo ago
are you a fed? lol.
Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
Useful for things like music festivals, campgrounds, having a mesh node in your camper van and another with your friends and another on your person. Imagine a large festival outside of good cellphone coverage or a camp site in the middle of nowhere. There are also credit-card sized versions which can be put in a dog's harness in case the dog wanders off (the radio contains a GPS).

fiskeben 6mo ago

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.

wang_li 6mo ago
v. a satellite enabled phone that can send text messages over thousands of kilometers? These people should not be making a short range text solution, they should be building a low bandwidth internet extension with gateways to the real internet. Most of the information content of the internet can readily fit over 56kb lines once you strip out all the fluff. And in an emergency where you need or want a decentralized mesh network, that's more important that being able to text, who exactly?
para_parolu 6mo ago
Or you just use iPhone satellite messaging without relying on extra devices that may not even work in mountains
- mplewis 6mo ago
  This won't reliably get messages between two users in the mountains.
  - LastTrain 5mo ago
    Neither will Meshtastic!
- davidkwast 5mo ago
  You can use both. In the mountains I would appreciate redundancy.
fodkodrasz 6mo ago
A PMR or DMR radio can also do that. And is cheaper and user friendlier.
- firesteelrain 5mo ago
  DMR without needing the site to setup your ID etc?
  - fodkodrasz 5mo ago
    might have mixed it up with dPMR, HAMs have lots of overlapping similar stuff... and love gatekeeping. Nevertheless IMO the mentioned demographics/use-cases want something turnkey ready, ~single button, and currently LORA based stuff is not like that, and is clumsier and needs a certain level of... tinkerer mindset, compared to a commercial license free radio system (which might have been set up with a minimal effort), where learning curve is basically volume knob and PTT button. I have handed out simple FM radios for total tech-illiterate people (mothers, children, elderly physical workers) in an outdoor event with 0 cell coverage, and comms worked perfectly over the dozen square kilometer area. Biggest incident was a lost radio handset.
    - firesteelrain 5mo ago
      I was more pointing out the irony that DMR is being promoted which requires centralization. Also, DMR isn’t all about Ham Radio. It is used commercially.

2ndorderthought 6mo ago

It's not all people trying to skirt the law. It's kind of like HAM radio as a hobby. It's fun technology that lets people do cool automation projects and sure with a mesh connect to other people. Imagine you have a few acres of land and want to turn on sprinklers or something. A lot of people use it just to chat with friends and family in a fun way. Of course the preppers and privacy evangelists see it as a means to get ready for living in a hostile environment. Being fair to them, things don't look awesome in the US. I bet a few criminals use it, but it's still very niche.

Cyan488 6mo ago

Just like ham radio, it's a an interesting technical hobby for those that may get excited when their little 0.25W radio hits a repeater 80km away. More practically, I'm going to try it out while camping this summer. In areas with low or no cell coverage, my phone is useless or dies quickly. Throw a repeater in a tree, and hand your friends nodes.

laurowyn 6mo ago

> What is the use case? It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate. Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep. The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times. Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.

repelsteeltje 6mo ago
Some scary applications come to mind. For instance, sprinkling a bunch of nodes + sensors in hostile territory should allow for gathering intelligence, guiding drones, setting of fuses...
- pohl 6mo ago
  ...but also resistance in the context of authoritarian capture.
- ungreased0675 6mo ago
  Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network. Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.
  - thadt 6mo ago
    That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…
- willis936 6mo ago
  Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.

tomjen3 6mo ago

Being nerdy. But also you don’t build these things when you need them (it will be too late), you need to build them before you need them.

srmatto 6mo ago

Digital Radio Hobbying, think HAM radio but with a microcontroller and apps.

dmd 6mo ago

If you see this technology and think "wow! that solves [problem I already have]" - then it's great. Otherwise, you buy a couple, set them up, spend a week or two sending very slow and unreliably forwarded messages that mostly amount to "hi! i have an ACME 32ABC radio! What do you have?", and then put it in a drawer or sell it on. Just like ham radio, really.

nsxwolf 6mo ago

I built one and found absolutely no use for it. No one ever, and I mean ever, answers you. It's sort of like ham radio, where you get your technician license and get on a net and discover people are just talking about their antennas. Except it's worse, because all the antenna discussions are happening on Reddit and Discord and not on the network itself. People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".

Melatonic 6mo ago
HAM I think used to be more popular when it didnt have all this competition and it makes total sense
devilbunny 6mo ago
The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.

qmr 6mo ago

The use case is off grid communications for whatever you might need. 95% of it is people just doing ping? Pong! In chat. The cheapest devices are like $10. Order one and have a go.

randerson 6mo ago

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.

nsxwolf 6mo ago
No one has once ever spoken to me on it.
- LastTrain 5mo ago
  Even if someone did, you’d only get every 10th message.

brk 6mo ago

There is no real use case, IMO. I setup a few nodes a couple of months ago. It's mostly no activity, punctuated by some random "can you read me" type messages, and for some unknown reason people who think there is something impressive about them having a node on a commercial flight. The entire thing would fall over in any kind of scenario where you needed to rely on this janky mesh network as a primary means of communications. It can be fun/useful for very out of the way things where you have a handful of people out camping, or other off-grid situations. But frankly even in those cases there are far better/established ways to keep in sync if you need to (eg: FRS). This stuff is mostly a solution looking for a problem.

TheSkyHasEyes 6mo ago

> What is the use case? I worked R&D on LoRa project a few years ago. Their use case was a long-range emergency communication system for workers in remote areas(no wifi, lte or LEO at that time). Now I see a bunch of applications in this field that aren't what you describe. :)

derekenos 6mo ago

I set up my first node after the last major Verizon outage that rendered my cell phone useless as a mobile communications device. Now, when the next outage happens, with the always-on base station that I have at home, I can bring a portable Meshtastic radio out with me, paired to my phone via Bluetooth, and retain the ability communicate wirelessly back home, or with any of the other many nodes in the extensive network here in the NYC / Hudson Valley region. I also enticed a couple of local friends to install them and we often opt to text over the mesh. I see it as a thing that is fun to play around with now, but which may become critical at some point in the future.

alterom 6mo ago
Like HAM radio: nobody needs it, until a real emergency strikes. Then everyone does.
- imp0cat 6mo ago
  Except the bandwidth just isn't there.
  - alterom 5mo ago
    There's not much bandwidth in HAM radio either. Any bandwidth is better than zero.

cheema33 6mo ago

I would love to be able to get text alerts when an event occurs, from a location that is not connected to the Internet, about a mile away. The need is not critical, so there is no desire to spend money every month. And reliability of the solution does not have to be high either. Something like this might work?

nohup2 6mo ago
Yes.

terabyterex 6mo ago

hiking with so far you don't have cell access. cruises when you don't have cell access.

wolvoleo 6mo ago

It's really for closed user groups. At least meshtastic doesn't allow you to see other people's messages, only those in your own group. They're all encrypted.

goody71 6mo ago

I've seen it used by folks off-roading/overlanding for coms. Gov/DoD/SpecOps use it to maintain radio connectivity with things like the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK).

chabes 6mo ago

People will go on and on about what happens to society when the internet or cell service goes offline, but when they see an emergency solution staring them directly in the face, they wonder what the use case is.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

"What is the use case?" Advertising services But only if use of the network becomes popular (Generally no one thought this would be the eventual use case for the internet)

VLM 5mo ago
Unlike ham radio, it allows encryption and doesn't forbid commercial use, so it'll get taken over by commercial interests if it works, or ignored if it remains small or fails. If it works the pioneers will get wiped out and removed from the network...

mrandish 6mo ago

I used to wonder the same thing and then we bought a vacation home and experienced no cell service in an area close to a major metro. It's only a 40 min highway drive outside a top 20 U.S. big city. Our street is only 12 mins drive from a major interstate highway with the usual suburban superstore sprawl (Target, WalMart, Home Depot, Costco) so it feels like we're in the middle of 'civilization'. But once you turn off the highway, that last 12 mins gets both beautiful (with rugged hills) and also very empty. Five mins from our house suddenly cell service from all the providers gets very spotty. If you live near the top of a hill facing the right direction, you can maybe jury rig a cellular antenna on a pole. There is legacy POTS phone service via 60 year-old copper but few use it because it's only ISDN barely faster than dial-up and >$100/mo. Otherwise, there was no option for reliable residential phone/data/text service until Starlink became available in our area a couple years ago. So everyone in our entire area has 2M radios to communicate in emergencies because in four years we've had two fires come close enough to close our roads, been snowed in twice (without power) and a small bridge got damaged in flooding blocking vehicle access in and out for four days. We can't even see any of our neighbor's houses from our property yet several times a year we need to get extremely local information from, and coordinate with, people we'd have to hike to visit. And it's usually because something is happening which takes out local power and/or road access. But the old 2M radios have to be monitored in a real-time which feels really antiquated. So, to me, inexpensive LoRa that could enable store-and-forward messaging and conditional unattended alerts suddenly sounds very useful.

filcuk 6mo ago

I'm using one of those devices with a tiny eink screen... as a pocket ebook reader. Sorry for the bait. Fun and easy project though, lookup Pala one if you're interested and dm me for improved firmware (restrictive license)

Melatonic 6mo ago
Sounds intriguing. How is the battery life? Color e-ink or BW? Would be great if it also ran some type of Topo mapping software!
- filcuk 6mo ago
  BW. I don't think colour would do much, as the screen is 250x122. Battery may depend on what you can find, but the one I have should last several weeks (still testing). I started on a tiny LiPo I ripped from my cat's floppy fish toy. To give more info here, it uses Heltec Wireless Paper, which is a self-contained unit and just needs a battery added.

the_gipsy 6mo ago

You send "test" and hope that someone replies. Sometimes you discuss new Meshtastic gear or setting up a router together.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ww520 5mo ago

LoRa is for long range lower power communication. It can achieve a range of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in practical conditions and up to 330 kilometers (210 miles) in perfect conditions. There are plenty of applications for it.

maxgashkov 5mo ago

One of the use cases is pairing it up with ATAK or similar tactical awareness system during SAR operations by volunteer brigades in remote areas with spotty coverage by regular networks. More info here if someone's interested: https://www.civtak.org/ https://www.civtak.org/

ingohelpinger 5mo ago

are you a fed? lol.

Schlagbohrer 5mo ago

Useful for things like music festivals, campgrounds, having a mesh node in your camper van and another with your friends and another on your person. Imagine a large festival outside of good cellphone coverage or a camp site in the middle of nowhere. There are also credit-card sized versions which can be put in a dog's harness in case the dog wanders off (the radio contains a GPS).