A couple of weeks ago, the dual band Chinese radio that my son gave me decided to quit on me. I can hear just fine on it, but I can no longer transmit. This is a little ironic, since a few weeks ago I had an antenna issue that allowed me to transmit, but not receive. I think the radio overheated. It has a fan in the back that kicked on after being keyed up for a short period of time. I was playing with it, and realized I wasn’t hitting any repeaters that I can normally hit. Thats when I noticed that the amp meter on my power source barely moved when I keyed it up. I also noticed that the fan was not kicking on. I hooked up my SWR meter, and there’s not enough power output to even register on that, so I took it apart, and didn’t see anything obvious. Just another victim of cheap Chinese technology…
In the meantime, I ordered my first Meshtastic node. I’ve been interested ever since first hearing about them a year ago. If you’re not familiar, I’ll simply say that its an off grid network used for short, basic texting. You can build your own “network”, but it utilizes other nodes, whether its part of your network or not to move messages along. Its an interesting technology, but it is totally reliant on people building the network. Each node will retransmit a message that it receives. There are “public” channels that you can use to communicate with strangers, but in my opinion its not really intended to be a social tool. Those public channels are mostly just folks asking if anyone is receiving them, with lots of 1 sided conversations. There’s also an internet “patch” that connects to other nodes thru the internet, but that’s not exactly in the spirit of what its supposed to be used for in my opinion.
You use an app on your phone to connect to your node via bluetooth, but the actual communications are off the grid when you’re not on the internet via mqtt. There’s a stand alone keyboard that you can purchase (also connected via bluetooth) instead of your phone, in case you’re skeptical that your comms are still “on the grid” when using your phone. It looks a lot like an old blackberry.
If you’re interested in meshtastic, I’ll let you do the rest of the research… there’s a ton of YouTube videos and other resources that can better explain what it is, and how it works, without me rehashing the same information.
When hooked up to the internet (it’s called mqtt in the app), I can connect to over a thousand nodes. I’ve connected to nodes as far away as Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, but as I stated earlier, comms over the internet aren’t exactly in the spirit of what Meshtastic is for. Honestly, it doesn’t even do internet comms well. When I turn off mqtt, and look for local nodes over the air, I get nothing. Nada. Zilch. I kind of expected this, since you can see public nodes on the Mesh Map (www.meshmap.net), and I have none near me. The ones you see on the map are only the “public” ones. I was a little hopeful that maybe I would connect to some private ones that I couldn’t see in my area, but apparently there are none.
After sorting thru some issues, and getting familiar with how it works, I turned off mqtt, and wanted to concentrate on only picking up nodes over the air. I’ve had mqtt off for over 2 days, and I’ve carried it with me everywhere, about 20 miles north, and 40 miles south, to north Macon, and haven’t picked anything up yet. Until this morning, when I looked at the app, and had connected with 30+ other nodes. It was a brief connection, apparently only long enough to register as being part of the mesh. I tried the public channels, and sending some private DM’s, and was unable to communicate, but apparently the atmosphere was briefly good enough to hit a node somewhere between 60-70 miles away. This is really crazy to me since its such low power, and in the 900 mhz band. I don’t know exactly which one I connected with, but that mesh included nodes from Pine Mountain, Marietta, Gainesville and Athens. Thats a huge swath of territory, all connected by enthusiasts, and completely off the grid.
Just when I was resigning myself to being alone on an island for a little while, I connected to a really large mesh. Even if it was only a brief connection, it showed me what is possible if the mesh ever fills in between me and the rest of the world. I’m considering building a repeater, with a high gain antenna to try and bridge the gap that is here in my area. While I have no misconceptions that it would completely fix the issue here, if I can contribute to making the mesh better, I think it might be worth it. The only part holding me back is that a repeater will cost $100-$150ish to build, and that money would be better spent on a new radio right now.
The first node that I purchased is a Heltec V3. I got a kit from the big online retailer for less than $30. It included the case, and a 3000 milliamp battery, which is enough to power mine for about 30 hours. It is remarkably small, and for the price, its a cheap and easy way to get into Meshtastic.
In case you’re interested, you should be warned that the option that I purchased does require some assembly, and programming. Assembly was easy enough, requiring the antenna to be attached to the board, and both of those pieces to be placed inside the case. Be sure to attach the antenna before plugging in the battery, or even plugging in the USB for programming. As soon as it gets power, it tries to transmit, and if the antenna is not attached, you can kill the board. No tools are required for assembly.
Programming, however, was a little more than simply plug and play. First, my computer did not recognize the device, which required me to find and install a driver. Then I had to go to a website, which flashes the proper program on to your device after you’ve made a few selections. Since the whole project is open source, there’s lots of variations to chose from. I kept it simple and went with the latest stable version. While none of this was hard, I would classify it as being slightly more than beginner level stuff. There’s plenty of YouTube videos that will walk you through every step.
My goal is to be able to have a repeater at my house, with a couple of nodes in each of my vehicles, with the ability to communicate with each other when we are away from home. My son lives about 40 miles away, and if I can get some of the ham groups between us to get interested and put some nodes on their towers, maybe we can bridge the gap between the 2 of us. None of this will replace normal texts, or phone calls, or even 2 way radio comms, but every different form of communication is one more tool available the next time ATT decides to crash!