So these are using LoRa (902-928MHz) as the actual frequency for text transmissions? This is really an exciting frequency that's been around for a while and has a lot of potential for disruption.<p>Fun fact--there is a completed WiFi standard for this frequency (802.11ah / WiFi HaLow), but as far as I know, there have never been any chipsets made for it.
It's great but until someone comes up with something better than 'solder on a screen, 3d print a case' it's going nowhere for lack of critical mass. The best thing that could happen to this is if it turned from a $35 project into a $50 product. I know a bunch of people who find it interesting and would be into investing in deployment (as backup comms for natural disaster scenarios), but nobody wants to commit to soldering 50 of these things.
This is absolutely brilliant. If this works as advertised, it'd be trivial to add mesh network capabilities to lots of the mountainous areas I'm frequently in while hunting or hiking or what not. That would be huge for safety, and substantially cheaper than a sat phone.
The project is really interesting and I think I am going to try it.<p>It looks like it's text only? would it be possible to add a very filtered, low-bandwidth audio stream since the phone can do all the calculations?<p>I have no idea on the actual bandwidth of these devices, wikipedia says LoRa is 0.3-27 Kb/s and Opus should work decently at ~10Kb/s I think. So maybe?<p>Although audio would probably be half duplex and only point-to-point instead of mesh, but it still could be interesting
Meshtastic has been talking about merging with Disaster.Radio for eons, because the two seem to have a lot of conceptual overlap. I can see uses for both feature sets and would love if they were just one thing.<p>It sounds like that's just not happening?
Patiently waiting for my T-Beam to arrive so I can try this out.<p>This is an open source alternative to the popular GoTenna devices and if any HNers can point me to other options in this space I'd love to try them all out.
We have a [#BCMesh started here in British Colombia](<a href="https://krisconstable.com/bc-mesh-using-LoRa-devices" rel="nofollow">https://krisconstable.com/bc-mesh-using-LoRa-devices</a>) if you want to join.
Me and my friends would pay for this. We fly paramotors and almost every weekend we fly to places with no cell connection.<p>Plain old radio is terrible (there's always someone transmitting all the time without realizing, blocking communication for everyone else) and the ability to check each other's GPS position would be awesome to know if the whole party is still flying together.
<a href="https://msglab.co/room/lo-ra-msg" rel="nofollow">https://msglab.co/room/lo-ra-msg</a> is a pretty neat concept/prototype.
I would love this for my dog, she runs in the woods and I like to know where she is. I've tried a Lidar collar but the range is too low. The only other option is a cell phone in a case (which is used by search and rescue) but it's to expensive since you need a cell phone plan, and it's and too bulky to attach to a moving animal.<p>There is a market for this, I'll help prototype it , someone start a company to track dogs and children (out playing, biking, skiing) :)
Very cool, I just ordered a couple radios to play with. Looks like the app is Android only although an iPhone app is under development. Any recommendations for a cheap android phone/tablet to use mostly for this application?