I started the hobby with a large interest in Packet radio could this be the modern answer to it ?
LoRa using Chirp spread spectrum modulation on 70cm can be used for point-to-point messaging as well as its most popular application, position tracking. Many on this reflector have demonstrated LoRaâs capability for messaging tracker to tracker.
But, beyond technical demonstrations, is there a realistic use case when phone to phone messaging is so ubiquitous?
As I understand it, when LoRa is used for messaging those data packets must go directly between mobile devices within radio range and that LoRa iGates and digipeater donât forward the packets, thus limiting the messaging to a smaller geographic area.
Until it fails. These independent mesh systems could be very useful in a wide area failure of the telephone system.
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Have you zoomed in on the WW map of mesh nodes (in Bradâs link) to the UK? Thereâs hardly a node in the north of England. Have you ever experienced a wide area failure of the telephone system? I havenât. I hope youâre not serious this could be an alternative to the mobile phone network should Russia hack our networks or power stations.
Without reading the details I assume the Meshtastic approach is open to all, doesnât require an amateur licence and uses a license-free frequency. So, what kind of packet radio are we talking about?
Iâm all for experimentation and self-training, but I say again, what use case is it ?
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We are moving to a telephone system that relies on power being available at all the end-points instead of one that is powered from the exchanges that have battery rooms and back-up generators. Wide area power outages have happened several times so a wide area telephone failure seems a reasonably likely prospect.
Hmm.
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Who is âweâ ?
It doesnât follow. There have been wide-area outages by individual companies like BT and EE in modern time but not due to power failures at mobile base stations or traditional telephone exchanges. They have extensive power backup systems, typically large battery banks for short outages and diesel generators for extended blackouts.
Commercial communication companies use fibre optic, satellite, and microwave links to improve network resilience by providing backup paths and diverse routes. I donât think any amateur networking though interesting and technically challenging for us, will ever be part of the system.
Thatâs why I ask [and havenât got an answer yet], what is the use case [application, usage, call it what you will] for the Meshtastic network (beyond self training). Itâs not an implied criticism, just curiosity.
Richard, you know nothing about my three and a half decades of experimentation and self-training as a professional research and development engineer in the electronic systems industry in Europe and the USA, nor my experimentation and self-training as amateur radio hobbyist. But you feel you can make that snarky comment. Iâm happy for you to express differing opinions from me but you should avoid making personal attacks.
Thereâs a few of these kicking around. Quite fun to use. My favourite is the Meshing around one - GitHub - SpudGunMan/meshing-around: BBS Mesh Scripts for Meshtastic
There are also mesh to matrix bridges and all sorts of things popping up. Iâm pretty sure that they donât really talk to each other very well mind you. so the TC2 BBS is really similar to the spudgun man version..but theyâre not good friends. Fun though.
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Happened a few weeks ago on the Vodafone network. I was driving home ( in Shropshire) and heard a couple of Hams in Essex ( on HUBNET) saying their internet had crashed, I stopped to fill the car up and realised my phone was caput and totally useless ( ASDA mobile using Vodafones network). The next day when it was back up and running I heard a couple of Hams on the same system saying their nodes hadnât been working so they were unable to get on air, bit strange that Radio comms were killed by lack of internet ! That aside should we as Hams be using radio rather than relying on the internet !
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I was referring to the 433mhz system where we as Hams would be allowed to use more power have a better understanding of antennas/Transmission lines and propagation and very cheaply Have a usable DATA system similar to the Packet network of old. In this area Shropshire and the Midlands there are many nodes/Repeaters using Meshtastic and Meshcore but on 868Mhz using effectively the same equipment.
Would it not be better if using our skills this site and many others could be used on radio ?
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You are citing a network provider crash (like the BT/EE ones I cited), which did not affect other network providers. So, itâs not a failure of all telephones (the âtelephone systemâ) in a wide area.
The point I was making was in response to Richardâs claim about power outages. Like the BT/EE crash there was no failure in Vodafone base stations and like the BT/EE the cause of the outage was a fault in system software.
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As an add on to my previous comments how did internet and Phone networks come into it ?
Is there a project or proposed project to investigate that or is it just an idea you have?
I understand that Meshtastic is a software platform that operates on top of the LoRa physical layer protocol for its radio communication, and that LoRa in its current implementation has to be low data rate and discontinuous tx to achieve long range yet low power consumption â hence its suitability for field sensors like location tracking.
Given the amazing processing gain of spread-spectrum modulation schemes like Chirp to recover weak signals even a bit below the noise floor, it would be fascinating to extend chirp-modulation to DV data rates using a bit more RF bandwidth than does LoRa APRS.
I havenât read (e.g. in Radcom) anything so far about experimentation with unusual modes, e.g. spread spectrum on 146-147MHz or elsewhere. I donât have the technical skills myself but I would be very interested if anyone knows of amateur projects in that area.
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That exactly my situation, The Packet Radio using Lora on 70cms was just an idea and being honest I would have no idea how to achieve such a thing. I can remember when I was first licenced in the early 90âs the internet was still not a thing for most people and most of the things I learnt about radio was from other Packeteers . That said I think the internet was much better then away from commercial rule. A while back a friend displayed this when he put in his search engine Dog ShXt the first listed item was Get Dog Shxt on Amazon !
Just an idea from the link on my first post
The UK and probably most other countries too.
Traditional telephone exchanges do have generators but most mobile base stations donât. If the phone systems requires power at the end-point i.e. the customerâs handset, then a power failure knocks out the phone. It doesnât matter how much battery backup there is at the exchange if the user doesnât have any. A mobile phone may continue to work, but only until the base stationâs battery runs flat in a couple of hours.
There was an AWS outage this week that shows how weak much commercial infrastructure actually is.
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Itâs true that Ofcom requires telecom providers to have only an hour of battery backup at those base stations to ensure vulnerable customers can still make emergency calls during power cuts.
But I want to remind you this discussion started, not with individual base station outages but rather with your saying wide-area telephone failure seemed a likely prospect, which I challenged.
I think this discussion is a distraction from my original point (to Brad in post #2) that an amateur-based packet radio system [interesting for self-training and local networks of like-minded amateurs] is unlikely to challenge commercial nationwide digital communication services - including high data rate video etc - that people (including amateurs) use daily via their phones and digital devices and notwithstanding that some customers of one network provider or another suffer occasional outages.
Application level usage (like LoRa APRS on 70cm) has been practical only where sufficient numbers of iGates and digipeaters have been set up by amateurs in a particular area (like the CumbriaLoRa group has done in Cumbria and the North Pennines https://groups.io/g/CumbriaLoRa/topics).
But nationwide the coverage is patchy due to big areas with no LoRa stations. Whatâs true for LoRa APRS will be true for other applications using Meshtastic software - you need a lot of nodes in the network to make it useful for others.
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Can I remind you of Storm Arwen.
Exactly that. Much of rural Aberdeenshireâs phone network is copper. We had a five day power outage (twice) and often have shorter ines, but the phone (landline) and therefore internet still worked. Cell towers all went down 15 minutes after the power went off.
By January we will be connected to the fibre network and the copper lines will be redundant. Unless the government stipulates backup batteries in home routers, cell towers and the fibre infrastructure, then the next outage will result in a complete blackout.
A side note - Deeside was subjected to a prolonged and slow moving thunderstorm last month. The power did go off for a bit and there must have been a lightning strike on the phone lines. Our router put on a pyrotechnic show, then expired, as did everyoneâs in the area. Oh, the cell towers went off as well.
Mo and I are heavily involved in Aberdeenshireâs 4x4 Response Group - COTAG. Mo as a controller and me as a trainer and responder. Every time the group is put on standby by the Council or NHS, we canât help, due to being excommunicado.
Enter Starlink, a power pack and a Honda generator. Provided to us by COTAG.
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Go and ask the people of Tiree.
Admittedly not due to power outage, but weather is becoming an important factor in our daily lives.
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