Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
bowshock.nl579 points by todsacerdoti 15 days ago
579 points by todsacerdoti 15 days ago
I've found Meshtastic is simply not ready to be set up in an environment without internet, as I discovered when I brought some of the boards I bought with me on vacation to a rural area with more space to test them, but very limited internet.
The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.
- To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the toolchains and flasher programs you need.
- The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer.
- The docs are hosted at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out, but this is seemingly not a primary concern.
I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!
I only ever flash via CLI or via "drag & drop" method. The web flasher is great for first-timers but there are 100%-offline methods for all the devices.
The android client .apk can be downloaded directly from github at https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android/releases
I do agree though, I feel there should be more effort to support "long term lack of internet" use case.
For this use case - internet resiliency - I suspect the availability of un-flashed LoRa boards will be approximately zero in situations where it's needed. I agree that building an offline capable tool chain would be a good idea (perhaps all you'd need would be RasPi sd cards already flashed with everything needed to flash and configure common LoRa boards, and an archive of android apks?) But if I were allocating internet resiliency club resources, that'd be fairly low down my list.
I think that depends on the scope of the risk someone is trying to mitigate.
As an example, Hundred Rabbits is living in a situation with extremely iffy internet. They live on a sailbot and work in computing out there. They have had to build their own tools that were not dependent on a reliable internet, or even reliable power sources.
- https://100r.co/site/tools_ecosystem.html
- https://100r.co/site/off_the_grid.html#internet
Collapse OS and Dusk OS are projects that are building tools to mitigate against the risk of society collapse. These are scenarios where, not only is there no internet, there is no longer any capability to fabricate any more silicon chips, and people start scavenging existing systems.
depends. I have a pretty good stash of compatible devices going back a few years (as I've been tinkering with meshtastic since 2022), and some are on very old firmware versions. If "SHTF" unexpectedly and I needed to deploy them to as many community members as possible, a good percentage of them would be useless because they are not compatible with the newer versions of the firmware. (on the upside, I do stash the firmware zips on my NAS, along with tons of other OSes, drivers, firmwares, etc.)
- Compiled firmware is available on GitHub, packed together with a script for flashing it.
- You can use Meshtastic CLI.
- Docs are in git repository in .mdx format: https://github.com/meshtastic/meshtastic
All "sins" you mentioned are results of trying to be more convenient for users used to web browsers. Current state of web is pretty far from being decentralized, including web3.
I think a lot of those problems get solved with scale and diversity of users/contributors.
Look at Linux. In the last decade there's been a huge boon and tbh, the biggest part of that is usability. UI/UX got a lot nicer and cleaner. I mean another part is Microsoft and Apple getting more hostile and people looking for alternatives, but usability is what provided those people space and a larger more diverse community is what made it more approachable.
What I'm saying is, keep up the criticism but let's also make sure to interpret it as feedback rather than pure complaint. So we can turn these things into what they can be. After all, this is the place where we make great products, right?
And never underestimate the criticality of documentation. It seems burdensome and annoying since it is always changing, but you can't get people to join your cause if they don't know how to. In your company or your OSS project. It's a very profitable investment
I think your client specific concerns may not be valid.
The web app seems to work fine offline. Save the page with your browser.
Android app is available pre-built on github.
iOS app can't be distributed to end users offline because of Apple. Blame them or buy a better phone.
> you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer
Which btw is a rather trivial thing to implement. I've seen devices host a control webserver with Ethernet-over-USB just for convenience.
Hearing this is exciting to me, because it is a very concrete and actionable target for a true “local-first” ecosystem and infrastructure.
I was very disappointed to find that the “local-first” manifesto was not the “local-first” as I understood it. In my mind, I should be able to connect an app on my phone to another phone via bluetooth, and sync without going through a central server. However, it makes very little economic sense, if someone is building a SAAS product that locks customers into dependencies on a central server where services can be metered and billed. To my mind, those are “offline-first”.
I have thought about what it would take to build a local-first software forge and package distribution, and yet, I couldn’t see a good reason to expend that effort. We have a lot of the pieces … with this example — if we want to be able to expand a meshtastic network _after_ a disaster, then the whole tooling, development, etc. needs to be local-first and resilient.
I tested meshtastic in a major european city with pretty much 100% mesh coverage and its real life performance was quite underwhelming. Often I would receive messages that I could not reply to because of differences in antenna gain and crappy mesh performance. Public chat was either completely dead or flooded with test messages. Everything was super slow because the mesh can’t actually scale that well and craps out with more than a 100 nodes. Even medium fast channel would clog up fast. I would never depend on meshtastic during an emergency because it barely works even when nobody is using it. I think a public wifi mesh would be more worthwhile. Older used wifi routers are pretty much free and in unlimited supply. They use very little power. Everyone already has a compatible client device on their pocket. Sure the mesh would fail during a total blackout but at least it would be useful for something when the power is up.
I agree with this assessment. I've been running two nodes for about a year, maybe longer, and in that time, I've only had perhaps two contacts.
Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868 MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down the road. While I understand that height is key (and my antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates very rapidly.
So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the practical execution falls short. I think established methods like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior, especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio incredibly affordable (around €20)
Have you tried the Reticulum network? https://reticulum.network
I have been meaning to try it out
I agree with you, Meshstatic is not really reliable in this situation. But you need to consider couple of issues: the power for a Lora node must be maximum 0.1W, compared to 0.5W of the free PMR446 handelds. Moreover the handelds are using FM that is not really efficient in term of power, while a Lora node can be powered easily with solar panels.
Wifi routers use quite a lot of power for the area that they can cover. Ten watts or so for a hundred square meters is a lot of you want to cover a whole city.
Almost everyone has one of these running 24/7 already. Second one with an external antenna wouldn’t make much difference.
Everyone currently has electricity on demand
Ukrainian grid has been targeted by russian drone and missile strikes for years and it just keeps coming back. Longest downtime (according to a quick google search) was approximately 12 hours. Complete long term blackout in a big European city is very unlikely these days.
Long term as "days", yes. But all of Spain had a blackout for at least 12 hours a few weeks ago. Turin, Italy, had a 10 hours blackout yesterday.
Makes me more impressed by the Ukranians honestly! After Russia is banished they can teach the rest of Europe what resilience looks like in this area.
Organizations never prepare for a crisis until there is a crisis. It just doesn't happen. The cost of preparing for a crisis is always higher than the probability-weighted cost of the crisis itself, even if the potential impact is bankruptcy, because the probability is always so low. The only organizations that prepare for crises are those whose sole purpose is to prepare for crises.
Regulators can also impose certain preparedness obligations on organizations, like power grid black start capability (the government or system operator pays generators a monthly fee to have more expensive equipment that's capable of black-starting).
Not all of Spain. A lot of areas had the power back in two hours, at least in the North.
Yes but in exchange you get way more bandwidth. No idea whether it would be enough to run a city-scale text network though.
Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be really useful (using phones).
Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.
It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings with weird chins.
Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.
That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.
If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.
The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.
> they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use
In some places. If you're dumping excess energy onto their network, in some regions they'll also charge you for that
> That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.
Australia has the highest density of residential rooftop solar in the world, making up about 11% of the grid supply. Feed-in tariffs are standard there.
Also in Australia, and yeah feedin tariffs are a thing, but during midday "off peak" times when solar has excess energy, they're down around 1-2% of the retail cost of electricity and that's been going down for years.
Anecdotally, amongst my social circle, people are buying house batteries because the feedin tariffs are so low it's worthwhile spending $10k or so to store your daytime solar for use in evenings/night - because it costs 40 or 60c per kWHr to buy electricity off the grid in the evening, and they only give you a cent or two to if you feed it on during midday solar peaks. It's way better value to charge your house battery (and you car if you can) than to sell solar generated electricity back to the grid.
Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything possible!
Yeah solarpunk is probably the most neglected out of all existing sci-fi punks, probably cause it's actually kinda nice and doesn't make a good setting for a gritty depressing story?
> It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity
The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.
The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.
I'd agree with you if I'd setup my solar panels. But if I'd ever install solar at home I'd hire a company to do all the setup. I believe that it would fulfill industry standards.
It wouldn’t. Just like hiring the best pros to make an extremely fancy kitchen wouldn’t make it equivalent to a restaurant kitchen.
It does if your local regulations specifically provide for small scale generation.
Local regulation on that topic usually revolves around easing the requirements for small scale/residential production, not around making them respect the same standards as large electricity producers.
Probably taking the "someone gets hurt" part too literally, but inverters do turn off their outputs when the grid goes down. It would take a lot of inverters to make all the other inverters believe that the local part of grid hasn't bee disconnected. I wouldn't be surprised if they had special logic to detect even that case. Of course, there is the case of simply having too much unregulated input to the grid, causing instability. But AFAIK that has never happened anywhere, at least not in a way bad enough to make the news. It is bound to happen if current trends continue, but appropriate actions will be taken at that point and have been taken in large solar installations.
First off, I’d like to state that the following post is about the challenges of handling residential production, not about industrial renewable setups.
The grid going down is game over. Once you’re at this point, there are already people going hurt. The way inverters react to this is irrelevant.
The thing making home setups not a source energy utilities would want to pay much for is that they bring no service to the grid (frequency and voltage management, ability to be turned off when the grid manager wants, reactive production management).
The part where people get hurt is that in overproduction events, the grid manager has no way to cut that production or even single homes, so they sometimes have to cut whole neighborhoods. That did happen already, even if it’s not a common thing.
I'm surprised that phone manufacturers haven't already implemented a mesh network. I guess you could kind of call Apple's Find My network one, but if you want to smuggle arbitary data the bandwidth is very low. Maybe Apple's new mobile Wi-Fi chip is a precursor to an actual Internet mesh network.
Battery life is a big deal and anything with decent speed would hurt that a lot. People won’t want to sacrifice their battery to get strangers online.
That is by design to keep you engaged. My current phone has 7050 mah and 80w charging. I charge it twice per week or so. If you have a slightly chaotic life you have to consider charging 30 times per day, hoard cables and charge powerbanks only to have it die anyway. Now I have one cable that doesn't move and doesn't break.
Not a single telco wants this. So it does not get built.
Interestingly DECT NR+ is a 5G standard on dedicated spectrum and has been designed to be a mesh from the start.
I don't think they themselves need to implement it. During the Hong Kong protests in 2019 they used apps like Bridgefy.
Blackberry had one, but it didn't seem to be a feature consumers particularly cared about when they fled to iPhones.
Meshtastic, like any other network (including mesh wifi) is not immune to the requirement for some planning.
My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding noise, and so local messaging out to 80km or so tends to be pretty reliable. The same would be absolutely impossible with wifi.
That’s with 80 or so local nodes on LONG_FAST, population of around half a million.
Thats said, Meshtastic’s routing algorithm is extremely inefficient and has huge room for improvement.
> My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding noise
What does this mean exactly and how does it address GP's concerns?
Different nodes can be configured to have different roles, which impact in various ways the effectiveness of the network. Having used Meshtastic, the previous poster will have some familiarity with these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi
https://web.archive.org/web/20111119205258/http://fabfi.fabf...
I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat project.
Meshtatisc's routing is extremely primitive and inefficient.
https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
I've also found meshtastic to be pretty ineffectual, in both urban enviroments and in totally rural ones where my devices are the only devices for >50 miles.
I've given more study to the latter, and I think it's the lack of store and forward reliable transmission. The messages goes out once and if it doesn't make it.. too bad so sad. The whole ecosystem strongly assuming you have internet access is also a real bummer.
If anyone is looking to improve it or develop a better alternative, I did help create a primitive you should consider using: https://github.com/sipa/minisketch
> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work
I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic
To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.
We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the future.
It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I personally would not miss. Until I did.
Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.
> To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.
To be fair, this is a real scenario for people in snowy/and or rural areas. It isn't uncommon for people in my area of Canada to get snowed in for a few days.
I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.
I guess it depends on your perspective. Here in Portugal, lots of people ended up sitting on their patios, chatting with friends, cooking on the grill, playing cards, sipping wine, and generally having a pretty good time. There was a collective groan around the small village where I live when the power came back on, and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning.
Right, it's fun to sip wine and chew bubblegum for a day, but that's not the scenario people are worried about
Also based in Portugal, big city, and had a shockingly different experience. Fights in the street over traffic violations, fights at the bus/train stops for cutting 3h+ long queues, people hauling multiple 5L bottles and emptying the stores...
I doubt everything would be as idyllic as you describe if the blackout went for longer.
> and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning
Hangover from the port.
Instead of doing drugs or chatting, I'd read a book on my Kobo.
The thing with the stuff you mentioned. I already drank enough alcohol jn my life to not bother with it anymore. Same with card games. And random chitchat.
You've had enough random chitchat to last a lifetime?
With my neighbors? For sure. Friends? Don't live near me anymore. How am I going to chat with my friends if they're hundreds of kilometers away? By way of a (smart)phone, which requires power.
We actually saw the effect of downtime during covid. In the beginning, a massive appreciation for health services. We all know how long that lasted. In the beginning, it was us against the virus. Eventually, we were fighting with each other, even over details. Rest assured, offensive propaganda services from secret agencies learned a lot from that (one may guess which one primarily).
If it was so awesome that wine drinking and chit-chat, why aren't we doing it? A pretty simple explanation is: because it ain't awesome. Yes, a change of pace can be regarded as a fun challenge or change of pace. Heck, it may even open up people to changing their life. But look how much we remote work post covid. Policies were reverted.
People absolutely drink wine and chit-chat with each other. They can't during the day usually because they have work.
It seems to me that these modern anti-social tendencies are actively driving a wedge between most people and their surroundings, making people further isolated from each other. Young people tend to spend time in doors alone because they don't know _how_ to interact with strangers. But they should because being alone is literally damaging to your health.
Being far away from friends is bad for you[1]. Being socially isolated is bad for you. Promoting a lifestyle in which you don't have friends and don't talk to strangers is akin to promoting a lifestyle in which you don't exercise.
It's not "awesome", it's a necessary component of living healthily as a human being.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-factors/index.... - I found this source from the CDC but there are numerous others
Perhaps too late to comment - but I think it's just population density being too high. There's only so much presence of others that you can take without getting tired of it. Just having people around is communication of its own.
That much anyone can figure, and my point is, that threshold of sustainable density can be way lower than commonly thought. We're just too used to it, like we're used to burning fossil fuel. There might be a "peak density", hopefully after population growth resumed on the high orbit and beyond.
The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.
But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
It’s absurd that we don’t require gas stations to have generators on-site. They have all the fuel they need to power them right there!!!
Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.
This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.
Gas stations are private businesses, and they typically make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in the c-store.
Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.
How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime? Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase? Or maybe we all invest in personal solar generation at our homes, with enough battery capacity to power an electric car and the home through those short winter days? This would cost tens of thousands of dollars for every household in the country. What about renters? Are they out of luck? Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?
> How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime?
Ready.gov has instructions.
> Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase?
oh, c'mon.
Do you or any one person you know use several hundred gallons of gas over the course of a few days on critical things? If that is the case, then yes, by all means you should have a private gasoline backup supply since you are running some sort of industrial scale operation.
If you are worried about it, just make sure you have a several day supply of gasoline on hand. For most people that use about a tank of gas per week that means filling up when you are at half tank. For those of us, like me, who live in a place where a generator is occasionally useful, a couple of jerry cans full of gas are typically already on hand. Hundreds of gallons could keep me powered up for weeks at a minimum unless I was really trying to use a lot of power.
For most people, gasoline is used exclusively for their car, which has a multi-day gas supply storage mechanism built in.
Lets say we require all gas stations to have the ability to pump gas during a blackout. Then what? It doesn't solve any of your hypotheticals. Without a beefy generator and a professional crossover switch, you aren't powering your home with gasoline. What is a working gas station going to do for a renter, or apartment dweller?
In any case. If things get actually desperate, it isn't that hard for a handy person to wire a generator up on the spot, and get gas pumping, although at that point, what are the chances that the payment network is online. At that point you can just run the pump by hand if it's truly desperate.
> Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?
Not absurd at all. Experts and the government actually suggest that people do some of their own preparations for disasters. They suggest that you have enough on hand to survive for 48 hours without outside help. There are entire government initiatives, campaigns and organizations based on this exact premise. Check out Ready.gov for the USA federal version. You can probably find state and local level initiatives where you are too, if in the US. Almost every large, multi-day, regional blackout in living memory is weather related, which also means it is predictable.
Gasoline has a very short shelf life.
Every source I can readily find puts that shelf life in the range of several months - so, not relevant to the scenario being discussed.
Stabilizers for 20 gallons cost under $10, allowing 2 years of storage.
And gasoline is insanely easy to replace if you have a car that uses it. Drive to station when car is empty, dump oldest 5 gallon can of fuel into tank, finish filling tank, refill can. Do it every three months. No gas is more than a year old, half the time that stabilizers allow.
If disaster strikes, you never worry about the gas you have.
I guess a government/population that cared about resilience would require them to add a few pennies/gallon onto the price to pay for backup generators. Maybe also bigger storage tanks.
Maybe they would just design a more reliable grid, or have an emergency management organization that can flexibly solve many problems instead of dictating huge costs to private business owners in order to cover for extremely rare events.
> and they typically make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in the c-store.
It's hard for me to imagine gas station convenience stores doing enough volume for this to make any business sense.
Pretty well known, and documented. You can google it, or do the math yourself. Typical margins are around 1-2% on fuel sales. You can check this by looking up the wholesale price of gas (search for 'gasoline rack price', that tells you what it costs at the distribution center), then add in taxes, and you will find that most stations are within a few cents of cost. Don't forget that gas pumps cost $20k per, and all of the fixed costs like tanks, testing, calibration, inspections, etc.
The business model for a typical gas station is to bring people in with competitively priced gas, since people are incredibly price sensitive to gas, and then make money with high margin c-store items. Most of the things in a c-store have triple digit margins. That's why you'll see plenty of c-stores without gas stations, but its pretty rare to see a gas station that doesn't have a business attached.
Movie theaters have a similar model. The movie gets you in the door, but it’s very low margin. They make almost all their profit on the concessions.
While I can count on one hand the number of times I walk into the store at a gas station in a given year, I know others who buy things on a daily basis, to the point that they’re on a first name basis with everyone there and the employees start asking questions if a few days go buy without a visit.
> I know others who buy things on a daily basis, to the point that they’re on a first name basis with everyone there and the employees start asking questions if a few days go buy without a visit.
... I suppose it takes all kinds.
Government imposes all sorts of regulations on all sorts of businesses; prices rise to cover it. Any one individual gas station might not be able to sustain having an expensive generator, but if they all need one, and they all raise prices to cover it, it doesn't affect the competition much.
I had to get gas every day for my generator during the outages. Only one gas station in down was in an area that still had power. If you don’t live in so cal and have to deal with public safety power shutoffs, quit talking out of your ass. Our power grid is so unreliable here that they really need to make the gas infrastructure more resilient.
When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel. The populace at large is never going to be prepared enough to deal with every gas station in the area going down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they won’t have any issues with the margins as they will simply all raise prices in concert.
I don't live in SoCal. I live in rural Canada where I get several power outages per year due to inclement weather downing lines.
It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.
A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.
Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.
It’s also not something you really need to plan in advance. It’s ok if you can’t pump gasoline for a day. If there’s some catastrophic outage that takes down an entire region for days, you can hook up generators to the pumps at that point. There are plenty of portable generators out there. It’s not like a hospital where people will die if the power is out for more than a minute.
You make a great point. Additionally, I know personally of one house fire that was caused by sparks from a power line falling on a stray gas can and lighting the whole place on fire. If you combine bad infrastructure with everyone storing a bunch of extra gas around the house, then that might actually increase fire risk significantly.
Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in elevators. Don’t have exact numbers but there were A LOT of them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My wife was stuck on a train and that wasn’t so great either. Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be only a couple km away.
It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though. There were disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.
That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.
But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only because they expected a resolution."
Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.
To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To get boiling water you need water, a container for the water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.
> Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.
That can get you sterile water, although it's extremely difficult to do and involves many more rocks than you'd imagine easily 5x the mass of rock to water to get a rolling boil for a full minute, but it doesn't get you clean water. Now you have sterile water with a lot of potentially very unpleasant dissolved solids. Certainly not something you'll be using to feed an infant.
Put the bottle in a smaller container of clean water inside the larger container of water with the top sticking out of the water so it doesn't overflow into it. It'll take longer to boil without the convection but you'll get there eventually. You can fashion tongs out of sticks to pull rocks back out after their heat has mostly transferred to the water while you put newly heated ones in.
it takes 5 minutes to build a simple but effective alcohol stove out of a soda can.
Sterile bottles? Millions of babies around the world are doing just fine every day without that.
With breastfeeding, which millions can't, for whatever reason (even if only prior preference, you can't turn it on at will). Bottle feeding young babies without the ability to semi-sterilise formula and sterilise bottles will lead to higher infant mortality.
Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to feed their children safely.
Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.
Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a minority of people really know how to survive without modern conveniences.
I would disagree. The dark ages were hundreds of years ago, the electric grid is much less than a century old. Plenty of countries have unreliable supply and rolling blackouts and have adapted to it or have just never became accustomed to the luxury of 24/7 electricity on demand. Being without juice is not the end of the world.
Those places generally have the luxury of 24/7 electricity, normally via diesel gensets, for key parts of their infrastructure, such as fuel transfer, hospital, food supply.
The places that don't have the fallback ready access to fallback diesel genset, like rural South Sudan or Burundi, are pretty close to an end of the world scenario.
Don't romanticise disaster. If a developed country indefinitely lost power, a huge swathe of the population would die, starting with the infants, elderly, and chronically ill. Then hunger and disease would come for the rest. Nonsense ideas that we'd MacGyver or bushcraft our way out of trouble are infantile.
Hopefully it isn't controversial to acknowledge that a few extra dead babies is actually a terrible thing not something you brush aside, right?
You mean everyone who didn't have an issue because modern hospitals have backup generators that can run for days, or even indefinitely if diesel-based?
The diesel supply in all countries is dependent on the grid, so days is the absolute maximum. The reality is often much less. During the recent power outage in Portugal, the Alfredo da Costa maternity hospital had only one hour's diesel and had to be resupplied by ministerial chauffeurs delivering Jerry cans of fuel.
Still, all the ancillary services that go into a hospital like water, sewage, medical gasses, cold chains, etc are all dependent on the grid, as are the people who make them work. If a large-scale outage happens, most hospitals will start losing patients within 24-48 hours and will close as functioning hospitals well within a week.
> Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications.
I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
Come on, what?
Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society we hear about?
The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed, there was space to have some debate about what positives could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live with outages alongside preparing to negate them.
I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.
moving the goal post must be fun, especially when you can't understand you're doing it, thus completely degrading the debate!
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.
I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.
Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/
Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.
If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can’t be used for other things like charging my phone.
Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't need batteries.
That's very smart and might end my quest for a truly quiet bedroom fridge, if it really only runs two minutes in an hour. (Light fridges marketed as "quiet" just produce near-constant annoying fan noise, quietly.)
It really works, and if you fill half the space with water then it'll only need to run once or twice a week (assuming you don't open the lid often)
It'll work just great to keep half the things in my fridge safe and none of the things in my freezer safe.
Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few watts for my phone).
Solar+battery is great for a few weeks locally with no power, or a couple of days nationally.
It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
> It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?
Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse," access to electricity won't even be among your top-20 problems. You're going to be more worried about how you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.
> protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.
This is a hollywood meme.
The reality is that aggressive looters/warlords will be very quickly disposed of and the remaining ones will fall in line and become semi-official protective militia forces, who will labor alongside farmers in small communities if they don't want to starve.
Food scarcity will be a much bigger issue that some nutcase trying to loot my solar panels.
What makes you so confident it would pan out that way rather than the meme way? Especially if potential warlords only have the memes for inspiration.
There are a lot more of regular reasonable folks who own guns (approximately 134 million in USA) than those who have some kind of meme warlord fantasy.
Which is to say, normal people really don't like shooting each other, and they REALLY don't like being shot at, so most normal folks would eliminate the threat of crazy warlords first, then form some kind of organized militia group to repel small groups of raiders/thieves.
Any large group of raiders would very quickly fall victim to its own internal politics and lack of resources, because they don't produce anything. You can't have a group that's 100% raiders.
It's just not going to look like Mad Max, ever. Sorry to disappoint.
For folks with a private well, electricity is the key to fresh water. At least for a while.
This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.
Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
Only because it didn't last overnight and wasn't at the peak of summer.
Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.
During peace, yes. If there is any sort of crisis, no
You're right, of course. Notice I edited out the Swan Lake reference in my quote - https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/1029437787/in-1991-soviet-cit...
When Whatsapp and a bunch of social media went down a few years back I took a stroll outside that evening here in Berlin and the streets were weirdly buzzing. It was a bit surreal.
Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.
I can remember I was at a birthday party and the entire topic of the f*cking evening was when it will be online again. With everybody checking every 23 seconds.
I left that 'party' quite early.
> "and when I turn on the emergency radio (if you have one), all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat."
Why did you cut out that part?
Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?
Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?
Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.
Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !
Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?
An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.
Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.
I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.
Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.
I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day. Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS without phoning home to Apple for an activation.
Throw-in a USB key with a Linux distro that works with your Mac. You could also flash Ventoy on it, so that you can have multiple distros in case you end up needing to boot some other machine.
Trouble is a Linux-on-a-key that you've never used before, is still a long way from being productive without a network to install all the packages you actually want to use.
It takes me about a month after a reinstall or new machine, to feel like I've really spread my wings and have everything installed that I initially forgot about. So I guess the recommendation would be "daily-drive it for a month before refrigerating it". And at that point, you might as well just make it your everyday machine.
With Apple silicon, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a Linux USB boot. The install instructions for Asahi begin from macOS.
Even if there were, it may be orthogonal to the anti-theft online Activation feature that wpm was talking about.
> Heck, even establishing plain http ... connections is tricky on phones now.
I had no idea. I guess this refers to app-store rules? Related to https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/applicat... and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preventin... ?
Or is it even hard to browse to http webpages? (No problem on iOS that I see.)
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres. They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc. between their networks over statically routed point-to-point IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet. (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)
For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.
The article's author mentioned speaking with some telco people, which apparently weren't aware of any resiliency emergency plan. Maybe there's some difference between EU countries and the USA on this.
Mesh radio bandwidth is pretty poor. Firstly, you have to compete with many interferers (albeit this might get better if the power goes down), including other LoRa radios, but more to the point, long-distance connections consume bandwidth and aquire delay and delay variation at every intermediate hop. It might be reasonable to use it for text messaging, but with per-hop bandwidth ranging from 0.3 kbps to 27 kbps, which will get divided down further over shared multi-hop links it will be impractical to use it for anything else except perhaps very-low-bandwidth telephony over short distances or visiting minimalist text-only websites.
It might make more sense if augmented by fixed multi-megabit point-to-point microwave radio links to act as a backbone, with LoRa only functioning as an access network.
I'd be interested to hear what experiences people have had with doing this for real.
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
I've just realised I've talked my way into the idea of creating per-city club-operated backbone networks based on something like 100 Mbit point-to-point Ethernet-over-microwave links. With tall buildings as hubs, you might actually be able to build a decent mesh, with WiFi, LoRa or both acting as access networks. You'd definitely want to throttle per-client bandwidth to prevent people from abusing your very limited long-range mesh bandwidth. None of this would be cheap; decent microwave links cost thousands, and you'd need backup solar and battery power for every part of the network.
I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level, but coupled this with a really high gain parabolic dish (I'm thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable, either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has already built, or even manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and regulatory barriers are to implementation.
"Big ears, small mouth" is exactly what the regulations are designed to encourage, so I don't foresee regulatory issues.
You don't even need extra hardware for the duplexing; the common SX1276 chip has separate Tx and Rx pins which are typically combined on the PCB. All you need is to route a PCB that brings 'em out separately, if that's what you want to do.
In practice it's tricky to aim two dishes the exact same place, so using a single dish with a single antenna at its focus is probably quite a bit more practical. The SX1276 also has a PA control pin, invert that and you've got your LNA control signal. Or don't bother with the LNA, and simply mount the transceiver at the focus to minimize RF feedline losses. You'd give up a smidgen of performance but gain a lot of simplicity. (There would still be coax running down the boom, but it would be carrying the wifi/bluetooth signal outside the dish's aperture!)
I didn't know about the chip having separate TX and RX pins. There must be a gap in the market for rooftop-to-rooftop LoRa transceivers that don't cost a fortune. Even using something like a 24 dB gain antenna would push range up by a factor of 10 relative to a simple 4 dB antenna, or get a substantial improvement in bandwidth/reliability at the same range. For an even simpler design, you could just put a 20 dB attenuator between the transmit port and the antenna, reducing the effective forward gain of 4 dB, while getting the full 24 dB in the opposite direction. Proper RF engineering details an exercise for the student etc.
Y'know it occurs to me: If you want separate east and west paths, the chips are so cheap, it might make more sense to just use two whole off-the-shelf boards with some software linking them together, one dedicated to Tx and the other dedicated to Rx. Same hardware, just only use half of it.
Google "cantenna" made from a pringles can.
Please don't. We have better antennas than a 2001 article of really really dubious RF engineering.
This article makes more sense if its coming from a city where only the large telco's are present.
Here Dresden (Germany), there are several volunteer organisations who laid wires through the city or have microwave-antennas (AG DSN, Bürgernetz, Freifunk), and there is a recently founded internet exchange run by volunteers (DD-IX). So as long as we have power, we got our own internet.
It sounds like the author is envisaging a system that works without power (as long as the batteries last).
The ISPs also have a system that runs without power so long as their batteries (and gensets) last. Typically 1 or 2 days without refuelling.
Meshtastic is fun but limited—more of a radio chat app than real mesh infrastructure. If you're serious about decentralized comms, check out Reticulum: https://reticulum.network
It’s not limited to LoRa—Reticulum works over IP, serial, packet radio, or whatever you have. Delay-tolerant, multi-hop, encrypted, no servers needed. Still lots of work to do and apps to build, but the foundation is solid.
Great talk from EH22: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking
> Great talk from EH22: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking
404s for me. This[1] perhaps? Note trailing hyphen.
[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking-
I feel like the better path to resiliency is not persistent radio connections between hobbyists on other sides of the state but rather intermittent ones between people on opposite sides of the bus and an application layer that arranges for people who are heading that way anyhow to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.
You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.
Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of long range skulduggery were to fail.
The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value targets: one where each user is equally an operator.
This idea sounds a lot like Secure Scuttlebutt[0]. I'm not sure the state of it. The client they link to on their website ceased development awhile ago.
I think that secure scuttlebutt (SSB) is a very good start, but eventually we'll need something besides an append-only log. Something that removes data that is no longer interesting. Something that, when it runs up against its storage quota, prunes data based on whether it is more/less trusted or likely to be interesting to a peer. Something that knows which peers I'm likely to be near in the future, knows which topics they're subscribed to, and which tries to be an efficient mailman based on that understanding.
But yeah, my vision is pretty much just SSB all grown up.
nncp [1, 2] is probably the best Sneakernet tool I've found. It's very UNIX-y which makes it pretty hard to operate if you're not technical but would also make it pretty easy to wrap around with a UI. You have to explicitly add a list of "neighbors" to your configuration and you can send "packets" either by spooling to file or using a TCP/Noise connection. You can also send data hop-by-hop and is e2e encrypted.
...and it's close relative NNTP. There was a whole distribution structure built out of intermittent data transmission. We've had the tools for this stuff for a long time, we've just switched to centralized, always available services because that's easier to build a company around.
Usenet is fascinating. It's said that communication system is doomed to reinvent half of Usenet the same way every programming language reinvents half of Common Lisp. Hacker News is a itself a worse form of Usenet. And yet almost nobody uses the original.
(Go sign up to eternal-september.org if you're interested)
While the network of Usenet is pretty fascinating, the NNTP protocol is pretty bad. It's a stateful protocol which makes it challenging to write clients for and the protocol itself is textual and chatty which makes it fat on the wire. ActivityPub is a much better "modern" manifestation of the protocol and its capabilities, though unfortunately the actual AP standard is barely glanced at and most people write code for Mastodon's implementation of AP with a minority focused on Lemmy.
Feel free to write a new protocol implementing NNTP semantics with less cruft.
Maybe I'm being a little too cyberpunk but it would be cool if the system somehow rewarded people for delivering messages over a long physical distance. You could end up with a courier community where runners spend some time walking around high-traffic areas collecting sent messages then jog to the other end of town so the encrypted messages can find their recipients.
At some point, somebody will set up long range wireless communications and then the reward for running a message would likely drop to so small that it wasn't worth it... but yeah that's exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. That way if something happens to the internet, prices for running a message go up, and suddenly running messages is worth it again.
The tricky part there would be working out a partition tolerant payments system. It's one thing to go offline in the middle of delivering a message, its another thing entirely to orchestrate payment across a smattering of disconnected networks (blockchains are not partition tolerant). I think it could be done, but that's an application layer concern... gotta get the peer finding and web-of-trust stuff working first.
Then you’d end up with something like Helium, which consumes energy and occupies spectrum for no productive benefit.
America is sprawling, unfortunately. That kind of approach would work in cities, but would be much less effective where people aren't taking the bus or even being around other people on a daily basis.
The advantage of something that can reach 6 miles is that it could cover suburbia and rural areas with ~20-40 acre plots relatively effectively.
Yeah it's not ideal for sparse populations but I think you could get a lot of coverage by just running a node with a solar panel wherever your mailbox is and also having your mail driver put a node in their vehicle.
Really the thing I'm trying to push back against is the idea that the entire path between them must be connected all at once in order for two parties to communicate. If we design for short range, partition-tolerant, pocket-to-pocket background gossip, then that same protocol will work just fine if you attach specialty radio hardware and give it miles worth of range, and you've still got the fallback ready for cases where all you have is consumer grade hardware.
On the other hand, if you design for persistent connectivity and then try to use it in an intermittently-connected context, you're going to have a much worse time.
> to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket. What do you mean?
Well "internet" gets quotes because if the source and the destination are disconnected when the message arrives then they're not on the internet.
It might look something like this: As you stand in line at the grocery store your device notices that a nearby device (the guy behind you) belongs to somebody who is trusted by one of your peers in the "gardening" topic. You're not a gardener, but your room mate is. So your device pulls a gardening related update from their device. Then as you head home with groceries your device is not connected to anything, it's just sitting in your pocket with a filesystem full of data. And then when you get home your roommate's device gets a notification about a reply to their question on a gardening related message board. That data came to them on your device. It traveled a few feet wirelessly at the grocery store, and a few feet wirelessly at home, but the majority of the transit was handled the slow way, by hitching a ride on a human who was traveling that way anyhow.
It would only work for small bits of latency tolerant data, and work best for information of broad interest (not so great for an encrypted email to a single party, pretty good for map tiles, open/closed hours, restaurant menus, etc). The simplest app to build on such a platform would be a sort of of distributed BBS. VoIP would be nearly impossible. But I think that small snippets of high latency text can get you pretty far.
OK but kind of outdated and incomplete. Meshcore is largely competing with Meshtastic nowadays: https://meshcore.co.uk/
To remember: LoRa only permits small text messages. Don't even think about images, voice nor binary files (I mean it).
Another option is APRS using satellite connections through a cheap chinese walkie-talkie (Quangsheng UV-K5) for 20 euros to send text messages.
The problem with lora (and APRS over satellite... well, even ground APRS) is, that the bandwidth is very limited and usually only for "one person at a time", so while meshtastic/meshcore might be fine for tens of stations and a few users chatting, once those numbers get higher, the routing/signalization uses up most of the bandwidth, and many people sending messages at the same time makes the whole system very unreliable.
APRS is a bit better, because it requires ham licences and (usually) a bit more expensive equipment, but with "SmartBeaconing" and just a few hams, you get collisions (multiple people transmitting at the same time, effectively jamming eachother).
Reddit is usually full of preppers and other idiots buying these cheap chinese radios, usually without any knowledge and licences (that are needed to use them), and in turn they know nothing about actual use of those devices.... simplex range in urban environment is measured in hundreds of meters or maybe one or two large buildings between radioss, and repeaters will be in use by actual emergency servics and not really usable for any kind of "private use".
tldr: get a few books, a pack of cards, wait it out, not so long ago being unreachable away from home was the norm, and we managed.
On the other hand, getting a license is pretty easy. If you have a US address you can take 2 ten minute exams online for $10 to get General class; that's usable when traveling globally. It's a fixed pool of about 300 questions, so a half day of studying should be enough.
With the license, there are ham repeaters for FM and DMR. My cheap Chinese radio can reach the repeater 15km away.
It also supports APRS, but only for sending beacons. I can't really test it as there aren't repeaters around.
Please stop with the FUD.
Portugal was for 24 hours without electricity. LoRa networks were jammed and non-operational because the bandwidth is limited. APRS kept working.
It is far better to have a walkie-talkie that you can use as PMR on the 446 range and use for satellite text messages than an expensive toy that very few use.
And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
> And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
In portugal? Yes, you need one. Probably in every other EU country too
In USA too.
I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.
Also, you cannot use the same device for PMR and ham radio bands, the PMR device needs to be certified for PMR use, that means that it can only transmit on pmr frequencies and nowhere else. Other devices (eg. ham radio) cannot be used on PMR frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's regulation which exists for good reason, because in cases of actual emergencies, trained ham operators can assist actual emergency services with communication, and that's impossible if every idiot with a baofeng jams the channels.
> I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.
Parent is referring to the “Safety of life and protection of property” rule [0].
[O]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
This rules applies to:
> the use by an amateur station
Not every billy and bobby with a baofeng are an amateur station.
Luckily, at the beginning of part 97 there are definitions of such words (you have to open the full document, not just this article)
> Amateur station. A station in an amateur radio service consisting of the apparatus necessary for carrying on radiocommunications.
So, for something to be an "amateur station", you need an "apparatus" (some kind of radio transmitter) and it has to be a part of "amateur radio service". That too is defined in the same document:
> Amateur radio services. The amateur service, the amateur-satellite service and the radio amateur civil emergency service.
It's not RACES (that's defined below), not satellite, so let's see what "amateur service is", again, definition in the same document
> Amateur service. A radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that is, duly authorized persons interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest.
So, for that rule to apply, you need a device (an apparatus), that has to be used for self-training etc (read above), for noncommercial, personal aim by a licenced ("duly authorized") person. Only then can you break other rules (eg power limits) in situations described in rule 403 you linked above.
Without a licence, a radio is just a radio, eg. a business band radio (like many motorolas are), and nothing in the part 97 (regulating amateur radio) applies to the user of that radio. Only when a licenced ham uses that (or any other radio, or even a homemade transmitter), in a specific way (described above) that "just-a-radio" becomes an amateur station.
Again with FUD.
In Portugal you are legally permitted to use channel 9 (27.065 MHz) in addition to the PMR channels. The hard line has always been on public safety bands. From a long time cooperation with the authorities (especially around the Azores) there was always an informal permission for that kind of usage across boats and islands because communication is difficult there.
Last but not least: taking the radio license exam is NOT a drama. Anyone can apply and get the radio license when they are serious into this topic.
What fud?
Channel 9 is a CB channel, and neither quanshengs nor baofengs work on those frequencies at all, but you need a certified/type-accepted CB radio to use on that frequency.
Same with PMR, you need a PMR radio to use on pmr frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's just hardware limits and regulation.
Yes, 12yo kids can get an amateur radio licence, it's easy, but you still need a licence to transmit on ham bands, and you still cannot legally use a baofeng (except the few pmr models) or a quansheng on PMR frequencies, those radios don't transmit on cb freqencies at all, and there are no legal "you don't need a licence in an emergency" exceptions.
I have a ham radio and still not got around to getting my license. I never transmit on it now but in a proper crisis I am not going to worry about being prosecuted by the radio authority.
And you shouldn't worry about such thing under those situations. Wouldn't make any sense except for bureaucrats.
You should worry about knowing the procedures, the channels, how to engage in communication with the hardware available to you.
The same applies to driving... you have to know the road rules, how the car behaves in what situations, how to drive in bad weather, heavy traffic, etc.
Now the best way is to get licenced and drive (=use a radio) in "normal" cirumstances to get experienced before an emergency. Somehow 12yo kids manage to get licenced, but preppers can't.
Your neighbor has access to a car, but still hasn't got around to get his drivers licence. In a proper crisis, he'll google "how to drive a car?" and "what does the third pedal do in a car?", and won't worry about being prosecuted by the driving authority.
You will in turn have to share the road with him in the same way as other radio amateurs (and possibly rescue services) will have to share the spectrum with you. You transmitting on a repeaters input frequency without a subtone set will in turn jam the repeater (PLL is before the TSQL) will make communications impossible in the same way as your neigbor stuck in the middle of the road with a burnt clutch will make driving impossible for others.
But hey, stay lazy, don't get a licence, i'm sure you'll be able to figure it all out fast when you're knee deep in flood waters.
> i'm sure you'll be able to figure it all out fast
Even if you do, a radio by itself is useless unless you can trust the people on the other end.
Perhaps your generator won’t start. A voice on the radio sounds like a mechanic and claims you need a new spark plug. He can offer you one if you can meet him in a neighborhood 3 minutes from your house. Is this a benevolent actor with small engine expertise and a garage full of spare parts? A well meaning elderly man with dementia? An opportunist luring you into a robbery?
You lose a tremendous tactical advantage in this situation if you’ve never met any local radio operators, gotten a sense of where they live and what they do for a living. Some are skilled experts. Some are blowhards who confidently give bad advice. Some live near you. Some are 100 miles away. You can figure it out, but it takes time that you don’t have in the middle of a disaster.
Get your license. Join your local Amateur Radio Club. Use your radio to chat with someone at least once a week. If you have signal quality issues, experiment with upgrading your equipment. Then the radio in your bug out bag will be of some value to you.
That is one of the best comments here and reasons for any prepper to consider a radio license.
Human networks can be stronger than radio waves, join your local radio club.
You don't need a radio license to receive radio messages, that is valid also for satellite messages received on walkie-talkies.
This fact alone is incredibly important to at the very minimum known what the heck is going on. Suddenly you have a cheap device in your hands that can receive updates relevant to survivors and victims.
In Portugal exist the 3-3-3 plans for anyone to practice using a radio. These are regular-weekly sessions with a lot of people joining.
But who will send messages to you? Including satellite messages?
In most countries emergency services have moved over to tetra or dmr, with encryption, and all the public related info is broadcasted on "normal" broadcast fm, where you need a normal fm radio, not a ham transciever.
That is a question you can answer yourself when trying it out.
In Portugal +90% of tetra stopped working. DMR only locally.
Satellite APRS continued working. Who will listen? Well, those from north to south on the country were listening. More important, they were listening who was still active because those were the stations running with their own energy because even FM stations started to go down quickly as the generators ran out of fuel.
Had the blackdown lasted a week, those with a 20 euros walkie-talkies would very likely be the only ones still capable of +50 km distance communications and +1700 km reach using satellite APRS text messages.
Try to see from it from that perspective. You really won't have electricity nor cellphone coverage and not even FM in such scenario.. It's all gone.
What I don't get about Meshcore is... What's their goal. They seem a commercial venture, their contact email is customers@..... I don't know they're license... I rather use meshtastic.
I think their basic idea is to have a more advanced (and therefore scaleable mesh) where you can have more control over the path your packets take. I dont get the impression they are very commercial. Seems to been started by people first approaching meshtastic with proposed changes to the algo and getting rejected and therefore "forking" (forking in quotes because I dont think they share any code)
Their iOS / Android apps are closed source, which is a turnoff for me.
Yeah, that is crappy indeed. The core itself is open source and someone could write a different android app but I doubt it would show up there as option.
In either case, they are a good competitor.
If I go to https://meshcore.co.uk/about.html, the fact that there is two youtube videos there and not a button that says "Download Docs PDF" shows me exactly how serious they are about "[We] connect people and things, without using the internet"
You could just about squeeze voice down LoRa with a really low-bandwidth codec, as really aggressive codecs can manage < 0.5 kbps. If you want to sacrifice voice quality but use standard codecs, the military MELPe codec has 600 bits/s as one of its standard modes.
And yet such implementation never was seen outdoors.
Because it would likely violate the restrictions setup for the LoRa frequency. Using a normal walkie-talkie has none of those limitations while being cheaper and more versatile.
Huh. Hadn’t heard of Meshcore before. Thanks for that. It sounds more organized than Meshtastic. Seems more polished, but also a bit more opaque (from my cursory examination). That may just be, because it’s not had as much time to get established. It has all the open credentials.
From her article:
> Their answer was both depressing and freeing: “You can’t. All you can do is be prepared with tools and a plan for when the crisis arrives. That’s when the organization will listen.”
That is so sad, but also, so true.
I was fortunate to have worked for a company that is over 100 years old, and that had weathered a couple of wars, depression, recession, market disruption, etc.
They were about as open to disaster planning as anyone, but they could also be head-in-the-sand knuckleheads. The biggest thing was the company had a fiscal and cultural conservative bent; quite unusual in the tech industry, these days.
Anyone that has managed a DR system, knows how difficult it is to get support. Disaster Recovery is expensive, resource-intensive, and difficult to test. It is also stuff people don’t want to think about. Sort of like insurance.
My suggestion as someone preparing for this kind of stuff since quite a while:
+ Quangsheng UV-K5 + Android phone with 3.5 mm audio jack + APRSdroid installed
Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
The issue with satellite stuff, is that it’s pretty sensitive to active attack. It will be available for things like natural disasters, but not necessarily for war.
In either case, jamming is a possibility.
That is inaccurate. You will NOT be able to jam a satellite outside local areas, the amount of power to do is monstrous and likely to cause cancer for anyone around.
In a real scenario these things work. Please don't fall into "what if's" which are exotic and confused as things bigger than what they are.
Well, from the comments, here, this sounds like a passionate topic, for folks.
I've always been interested in helping folks that help folks.
I started looking at Meshtastic, some years ago, but found the ecosystem to be a bit overly-complex, as is often the case, with "Swiss Army Knife" approaches.
Yeah, indeed. If you are in the mood, dive a bit into APRS.
Best thing is the android app combo with the walkie-talkie. Tends to give a usable setup that works for voice and data.
> You will NOT be able to jam a satellite outside local areas
It is true that you will not be able to jam the _downlink_ frequency outside local areas.
But due to the FM capture effect, anyone else in the same hemisphere with a basic 100w transmitter (and appropriate antenna) on the _uplink_ frequency will be able to deny the satellite service to all the 5W Baofeng radios that preppers are stockpiling.
That level of argument is already at Reddit level where every little detail is a reason to be "right". This is tiresome.
Look: if someone is jamming something with a 100 watt transmitter which causes impact on the adversary, that location is quickly bombed because it is now a giant beacon that advertises its position.
I'll even throw a cheap appeal to authority and mention that I've done this stuff professionally in the military for a decade. I'll still trust more on the usability of my cheap walkie-talkie capable of +50km range and satellite texts than an exotic LoRa used on the ground by few internet warriors.
I think the Internet warriors are trying to build their own entirely self-sufficient network independent of the state or commercial worlds, which is, as you say, tricky to do only with resources legally available to the general public. Armed forces have had these things nailed down pretty much since the invention of radio.
> Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
You’re not going to reliably get that without terrestrial infrastructure, unless both you and your correspondent are conveniently standing on mountaintops.
5km in the suburbs, maybe. Closer to 500m at street level in an urban environment.
You need a ham radio license to send data on APRS frequencies.
Depends. Various parts of Europe have bands that can be used licenseless and allow data, e.g. in Germany there was somewhat of a community doing APRS-over-CB (past tense because I haven't kept up if thats still a thing).
Except under emergency situations, which are the cases we are talking here.
Things like this really benefit from experience and practice though. If an emergency is the first time you try to really use your radio, it's probably not going all that well.
That is indeed true. Practicing is important. To remember: APRS is available on other frequencies and methods, one does not need a radio license to receive text messages.
APRS is friendly enough to permit sending messages using normal internet and receiving messages from friends while on the outdoors. However, all of this requires practice and know-how.
i always wondered if in case of natural disaster/war the state does really have the time and resources to chase unlicensed use of radio frequencies
it doesn't, but if you only start learning and using your equipment once disaster has hit you are a bit late (and possibly getting in the way of others trying to use radios properly).
Yes, that is the case. By the time you learn and get more equipment, you might as well get a proper radio license too. If you are interested on the topic, it is worth doing (in my opinion)
AFAIK Meshcore was started by a disgruntled Meshtastic developer. It has got a smaller community and is messaging only, no sensor data transfer.
Then maybe time to know more rather than just throwing such claims.
The network itself does far more than what other projects were doing and is being fast adopted across Europe.
> Then maybe time to know more rather than just throwing such claims.
Then please educate me, I'm listening.
I'm not your teacher, nor interested in that role. On Youtube you find complete comparison videos like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T56GTiHvZuE
To be fair, he actually says that he isn't able to do comparison vids, yet (because the UK is fairly flooded with Meshcore, so I guess it's a good reason).
The video is a promotion for Meshcore.
But I'm not sure that's necessarily a negative. Meshcore does seem to be a good thing.
The one issue, from my limited understanding, is that Meshocore doesn't seem to have integrated positional data, which would be very important for things like emergency response efforts.
1. Meshtastic / LoRa is just bad for communication, it has so many problems
2. In case of conflict, everyone who starts LoRa gets delivery of artillery shell/rocket on their position.
Just like in Ukraine, try to go there and start up stock firmware DJI drone there and see what happens :)
Same when using radios in UA, no.1 rule is to NOT use encrypted radios, I like this example the most, because it goes against common sense, why would you want to use unencrypted radios so enemies can see your whole communication.
Reason behind this is following, encrypted radio traffic is very interesting for enemy, so it means if someone using it, he must be someone important -> send shell, badabum.
If it is that easy to become an artillery target, you can use it to your advantage. Randomly place LoRa devices in area near the front (by autonomous or fiber optic drone drop to decrease risk). Switch and off by some random timer and see the enemy deplete its shells and drones.
"the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" applies in other circumstances too.
But the wider point is generally that just because something is less effective doesn't make it useless, and just because something is effective doesn't make it dominating.
If an enemy has an artillery advantage, then shelling obvious decoys is still taking decoys off the field, which you now need to replace. But worse, their existence is giving away the fact you're active in the area, and their placement is giving away your operational range - i.e. how far can a person move on foot over rough terrain? How far in a vehicle? etc. What's the effective range of their normal infantry weapons - if you know there's a decoy then the trap has a specific radius if it is a trap.
All on the bet that they will in fact run out of shells - or in the case of drones, they won't even run out since a drone can much more easily be re-targeted.
Well you entering deep level of game theory here. Can you distinguish the decoy from the real and what resources you need to spend (e.g. LoRa device in a home)? How much is the signal that you can deploy decoys worth? Isn't deploying decoys below some noise level of frontline drone activity and the enemy cannot learn nothing? How many shells do you need to destroy a decoy? How certain you are about the destruction?
* I would consider adding a T-1000 device to the recommended list of devices, it's about the size of a credit card and works very well to add Meshtastic to phones. https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Card-Tracker-T1000-E-fo... It's a lot easier (in my opinion) to get people to stash a radio and remember how to power it to Bluetooth then to get setup from 0 on a new device. I think I paid about 40 euros each when I bought a pair.
* I have a Starlink mini--in the event that there is ever a broadly disconnecting event I'd be happy to share access to it. I keep it pretty much exclusively for emergency use and occasional camping/rural holiday house vacations. You might want to consider one too? They're ~250 euros new, which for someone who's starting a club for anything seems like a plausible expense. I believe there's a chinese version in case you don't want to trust the whims and emotions of Musk. * https://kiwix.org/en/applications/ is pretty useful if you'd like to have an archive of technical information, wikipedia, stack exchange etc.
* I try and keep whatever feels like the smartest open weight LLMs at the time available so if something real bad ever happened it'd still be available. I might add that idea to your preparedness list too--I'd probably take LM Studio with Gemma 3 over another random engineer on the Meshtastic channel :)
* Would you share channel config details for your IRC community? I'm happy to join.
Regarding the T1000-E:
> Note: Currently, LR1110 radios are unable to receive Meshtastic packets from the older SX127x radios, it requires a breaking change to fix this. Transmitting works and when hopping through an SX126x radio, you can still receive packets from SX127x radios.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/seeed-studio/se...
Its range is also much worse than the T-Echo's.
I think that's totally fair if you're primarily working in rural/not dense communities. If you're in a major city, in practice it just doesn't matter and ease of use is king. In a disaster, everyone with a meshtastic radio has it on. Your messages will propagate just fine.
Good point about the Starlink Mini - I need to add one to my kit too. Looks like I'll have to head back to https://gearscouts.com to find a bigger power station since the Mini pulls ~40W and my current setup won't cut it for extended use. That EcoFlow Delta 2 Max at CA$0.80/Wh is looking pretty tempting now.
Starlink mini has a monthly cost, right? So it wouldn't be just ~250€ but more like 250€ + 50€/mo.
I thought so too, but apparently on starlink roam you can pause service (by the sounds of it, indefinitely), only restarting when you need it:
> You have the ability to pause and unpause service at any time, with billing occurring monthly.
Source: https://www.starlink.com/support/article/dd5b43b5-20e1-b29b-...
If the internet is down how do you unpause the service?
I think you still have access to whatever user-portal starlink uses, so you can unpause it that way. But I have not confirmed this, and could be mistaken. The documentation only mentions that when you are out of data you have access to that page, it doesn't mention anything about when your plan is paused.
> If you exceed the allotted data on the Roam 50GB plan and have not opted-in for additional data, you will be unable to use the internet except to access your Starlink account, from which you can add additional data or change plans.
If you're not using it you don't have to pay the monthly cost. So buy the dish and just don't activate the service.
Watch her 10-minute RIPE 90 talk and then listen to the first "question" for a short tutorial on how to behave like a prick: dude didn't even have a question, just wanted to let everyone know how much he knew about a somewhat related subject
that is one of my pet peeves: people who try to dominate discussions or make them about themselves (you might notice they say "I" a lot)
another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different times along the way
if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your question: *think* about the question first; compress it into 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark; say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, immediately be silent so the answerer can actually answer the question and get to other questioners
if you're worried they might not understand the question that way: do it anyways, and if they don't, wait for a chance to ask again (after others have had theirs)
For grid-down data my preference would be laser instead of RF as laser is regulated by the FDA and not the FCC not that either would take interest. With laser one could send incredibly large amounts of data very fast. It's more manual setup but I would expect once set up it would be far more reliable, better for setting up mountain top repeaters and meshes. Laser is also better for data privacy encryption aside as the beam is directed to a target vs. omnidirectional broadcasting. During grid-down most people that would be using a mesh would be at static locations. One could then bridge in these RF omnidirectional devices into the mountain and home repeaters to prevent over-saturation.
Another nifty feature of a manually positioned laser is the automatic measurement of time domain. One could have an optional security feature to automatically disable the data-stream if the time domain of the laser changes in physical distance of more than {n} user-defined meters or centimeters to prevent MitM (Monster in the Middle) beam interception for the extra properly paranoid types.
There can be weather issues for laser but for that one could fall back to voice using any one of the hundreds of makes and models of HAM gear that can operate on and around 11 meters by moving a jumper or holding down two buttons when it is powered on. Illegal but only enforced by monthly example of someone impacting revenue generating sites. Voice changers and scramblers FTW. RF signature ignored. Don't use sloppy SDR's. In a grid down event TLA's will be busy with higher priority issues and will "look into it" eventually by which point the transceivers mysteriously vanish assuming one can even get the TLA to show up.
I don't understand this fascination with networks that require special hardware to intermediate between end user nodes. Would be much nicer if things just ran, zero-click, via WiFi, on most common computers, netbooks and phones, pure p2p with automatic forwarding, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
By requiring special hardware, and be it just some common router, or any sort of special technical skill, you are already excluding 99.99% of the world population...
This isn't about convenience and accessibility so much as resiliency in emergencies.
You can run LoRa from a small power bank for days, or run it off of a small battery and solar panel indefinitely. Wifi is much more power hungry. Wifi also doesn't offer kilometres of range, making that power cost largely wasteful.
In an emergency, if you have limited power, WiFi will exclude 100% of the population simply because it's not practical to operate at all. LoRa, even if it enables 0.01% of the population (primarily experts in the technology) in that emergency, is a greater benefit to everyone at that time.
WiFi is a peace time technology based around a rich infrastructure that is not resilient in emergencies. If you skimmed the article you should check it out again. She details this stuff, and it's actually really interesting and worth understanding if you're into this stuff:
LoRa radios have several advantages for use in emergency communications:
no centralized infrastructure needed
no license needed
cheap (starting at ~€20)
low-power (< 1W, can power with an ordinary mobile phone powerbank)
runs open source Meshtastic firmware
can send text messages across several line-of-sight hops (several kms)
can connect via Bluetooth or WiFi to phones/computers
many urban areas have a good Meshtastic network alreadyWiFi (with extra hardware, mostly antennas/routers, not too expensive anymore either) CAN offer (even tens of) kilometers of range, at least point to point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lYJFwXw1ZIc
https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-ltu-5ghz/pro...
only 9W max power consumption too! well, that's not a few hundred milliwatts, still, better then ye olde lightbulb
PLUS gigabit throughput
if only our network stacks and protocols didn't assume hierarchical (local) networks by default, and kernels included p2p network stacks, then i'd feel more confident about blackouts being handled more gracefully
well, i suppose all this depends heavily on the nature of the emergency
generally i'm surprised that the sheer computational power of modern smartphones are not used more for this purpose, i haven't come across much true p2p software
on another note, there is still no (truly) cross-platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop standard (especially one without artificial limitations), which is a shame
also i want to note that smartphones can even communicate directly with satellites now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
Yes, I use my phone over satellite regularly now. It's still amazing to me that it's possible. Phones are a great tool here because everyone truly does have them, they're portable, and they have large rechargeable batteries that can charge from countless sources over USB. So, it does seem like we could use them to great effect to create networks when other systems go down. I'm not sure they can handle long range comms due to requiring antennas, but close-range in cities might work well. I'm not sure what routing on that mesh would look like, or how busy it would get and how well phones could handle that.
Satellites could be an important component here, but there's always the need for redundancy. They can be compromised too, and you don't own them.
The LTU Extreme Range hardware is way, way more expensive than a LoRa radio, and it still uses quite a bit of power (relatively). It still seems far from ideal in situations where you can't depend on power utilities. Great point though, I wasn't aware that exists. It appears you need the one you linked as well as the Rocket as its base station, which puts it close to $800 CAD after taxes.
Its been on HN before but its worth a repeat https://reticulum.network/ Its got more optimization for a low bandwidth LoRa without the brute force stuff of meshtastic
I would use Reticulum instead of Meshtastic. https://reticulum.network
Pros: - it can actually scale past 20 devices - Forward secrecy encryption - Is designed to support multiple underlying transport systems such as TCP or LoRa - Announce based routing rather than flooding the entire network which is order of magnitudes faster Cons: - Not as many nodes as Meshtastic has - Python implementation with no C implementation (can be speed up with cython however)
Is it legal in the USA? I seem to recall that ham operators aren't allowed to encrypt their traffic, that's one reason I never got around to getting licensed. Maybe LoRs allows for it because it's unlicensed?
Ignore me, I answered my own question. Encryption is still illegal on HAM bands, but legal for things like LoRa that are unlicensed (hence WiFi).
Nice, it took less than a minute to find a PDF of the docs. That's already more seriously "offline" than the alternatives.
For a more baby-steps approach to resiliency, one might start running software on less-virtualized computers, creating a small home-lab, running software on bare-metal hardware that you actually own.
Also related though maybe not resiliency-focused: It's quite easy now to download all of Wikipedia and all of Project Gutenberg to a hard drive, so that whatever problems you have in the post-apocalyptic hellscape, boredom won't be one of them.
Kiwix is the best software I have found for this and they make an extensive library of materials available for download themselves, which includes the aforementioned but also many other resources that would be helpful in a disaster scenario: https://library.kiwix.org/
Many people already do that (e.g. I use Linux on a Laptop- I consider this bare-metal).
The way I read this, it's more about what is needed to get services back up after a large scale loss of critical infrastructure: communication to other network/internet/infrastructure professionals.
Or even just install local software. Get a computer that lasts (have at least one non laptop). Have maybe some maps and Wikipedia locally.
Maybe walkie talkies too? Pretty simple to use!
Fun fact: At least one ham radio store ran out of walkie talkies during the power outage in Spain, also there was plenty of chatter on 446 when it's normally quite quiet.
I spent the weekend moving all my personal projects away from github & AWS to to dedicated hardware in the EU, still not in my own home, but I'm toying with the idea of purchasing some hardware to run gitlab etc from my home network.
Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a financial hit for my paranoia.
but who has the gear, who keeps it charged, who actually shows up when the net goes dark. tech's the easy part. the hard part is getting 5 neighbors to agree on a channel, a meeting point, and a backup plan they’ll actually remember.
also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need them
That's why you can't rely on it.
If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.
The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building long-term resilience is much harder.
IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.
I have a WAP on my shed roof and batteries that can power my gear for a few hours without the grid. In the absence of other WiFi networks the one atop my shed would stand out as a rallying point.
(It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we didn't have power outages).
The problem with these things is that people have no urgency to prepare, by pro-actively improving software and documentation, or even simply installing them. They need to be something people get value out of even before disaster hits, by improving performance or decreasing costs, for example.
saveitforparts has multiple videos on meshstatic, if you want to see it in action, it is super interesting, but not without flaws apparently
This sort of thing is interesting but I guess I've always found it really hard to invest my limited time and money into prepper-type stuff.
Are there use cases for this sort of thing that could make it worthwhile even if doomsday doesn't arrive?
Just dropping a HAMWAN link for anyone who is interested in higher power / longer range links. https://hamwan.org/
> Initially I looked into ham radio, but it is just too expensive, difficult, and power-hungry to be practical.
Beg to disagree here. 30 dollars for a cheap-ass Quansheng will get you pretty far as long as a repeater is in reach (if it's Echolink capable, worldwide), and a bunch of repeaters for all kinds of modes are tied together not only via the Internet but also via AMPR / HamNet [1]. APRS and DMR capable devices are in the 200 dollar range.
For high bandwidth data communication it becomes a bit more involved - Ubiquiti hardware for example can be trivially software-modified to transmit on the amateur radio ranges, which is how that gear ends up powering a lot of HamNet stations. Sadly, unless there's a HamNet node on a nearby large structure you'll probably need to raise a tower large enough to achieve line-of-sight to the nearest HamNet node.
For people in reach of the QO-100 satellite (i.e. Europe, Africa, about half of Asia), there have been experiments to use that satellite not just as a repeater for voice and video, but also data [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
[2] https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-ip...
I read the title and the first few sentences as resilience _to_ rather than resilience _for_ the internet.
Things would improve a lot if we added offline abilities to html documents. I think atm there is no way to guarantee a website stays in the cache(?)
Designing a system to decide when to keep something is tricky. Maybe each visit and each click should extend the expiration date and increase the storage for static documents. Say, 10 visits should be enough to buy 1 mb of permanent storage to be spend on however many pages it takes starting with the frequently visited pages then a manifest or the order of links on the front page then the first from each sub page etc
It should also be possible to have the browser manage updates rather than every man for himself with each website testing the connection, checking for updates and stitching things back together again. There are quite a few schemes it could follow, smaller requests would require more complicated backends. Different pages with different update frequencies.
I think the single star bookmark button could have 1-5 stars with 5 assigning somewhat generous data to the website and 3+ allowing a prompt for very large things.
Then, since I'm serving static content anyway I really couldn't care less how the user obtains the files. If there is a copy of the website on a network all you need is a public key or to trust the user (at the price of annoying prompts warning you on every page view and every request)
If it all works well enough HN could be a tiny website managing only active discussions. If you have the key and a working connection to some other users most of the archive could be there. The catching priority could change to the rarest pages.
I am into Meshtastic but the coverage, at least in Italy, is low and depends a lot on the position. If you are in a city, you can get many neighbors nodes, otherwise you need to be at high altitude, relying on other nodes or use a directional antenna.
Anyway, it's a nice hobby to learn a lot about solar powered systems and antennas/propagation.
I think that one of the best use cases for Meshtastic is to use it during protests, especially in authoritarian countries.
yeah it is kinda like starting your own internet infrastructure.
For protest there are already bluetooth messenger for that:
but yeah it is only for Android.
That is a crappy project. Please try it yourself to see how badly it fails.
At present there simply exist no good BLE messengers any more since recent updates to the BLE stack.
I was once doing a review of an ISP's emergency response documentation, and it was 1 page. All stakeholders were to report to the primary datacenter and begin restoring services. It only really accounted for a single risk (Outage with no physical hardware failure) and didnt account for the scope and presence of their network. When I flagged it with them, they added a second section for cyberattack that was also loosely defined.
I really love the idea its the proposal itself I find odd. "Internety people" isnt really a well defined list of stakeholders. And I am struggling to figure out what outages could be handled by a group of undefined meshtastic users, especially with the overall tone that warfare might be involved.
Really the work of network resilience begins before the bombs drop. And its basic stuff. Keep everything patched. Keep your physical infrastructure secure. Ensure your data is safe, and you implement security best practices. And thats a list of things that largely we know that ISP's dont do.
Once thats done, every netadmin needs reliable OOB access to their networks. Now, OOB access might cease to function in this scenario. In which case, you are looking at ensuring that you have reliable physical access to your network. If you need cell service to communicate with your OOB solution, and it fails, dont also rely on cellular access to hands on techs. I dont know if Meshtastic is a useful solution here either, but having pre drilled emergency response plans so that qualified staff show up to the right locations for briefings/network access are crucial. Generators within reach of technicians, you might not be able to buy a generator during an incident. Console cables and tools already distributed.
Of course this all costs money.
Ultimately if you have no power, your peers dont have power, and theres an unspecified amount of physical damage (like a datacenter getting bombed) theres not going to be much you can do on a timescale that makes meshtastic make sense.
If anything theres probably some room for a government solution. Propose a hardened communications channel for private sector network engineers. Make sure that access to government infrastructure comes with a requirement that you actually patch and secure your network. Begin any large scale internet infrastructure collapse by getting a list of available engineers and resources and working out the compensation later.
This module from SeedStudio is perfect for a small portable node. https://www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-SX1262-with-XIAO-ESP32S3-p-5...
There is also a version with Rak chip instead that ESP32, that is a lot less power hungry and it's perfect for a solar powered module.
Meshtastic isn't very good (at least before their 2.6 release) [3].
It's clear they didn't research any historical mesh network schemes (ALOHAnet [0] and other MANETs [1]) when writing it. And flood routing more or less kinda worked, but as it go popular, it stopped working reliably. There's a video from Jeff Geerling about it and he was generous I think when he called Meshtastic "Beta" [4].
Meshtastic a few years ago released a youtube video describing how it worked, and there wasn't anything about topology resolution, it was pretty much about signal strength and device type [2].
This caused an issue because anyone could create a router. And often they did. And when they did, this could break routing because the router is in the other direction of where the originator wanted the traffic could go.
They also prioritized letting the edges forward the message on. AFAICT they could only detect this by signal strength. So a badly performing node (bad antenna or maybe a node turned on in a basement) could get priority.
The last issue is congestion. Nodes can send telemetry, often rather quickly, but that could get flooded on the network. And with a hop count max of 7, it often will go where it's not wanted, wasting the network bandwidth -- as nobody really cares about one particular node's battery life.
So in a dense Meshtastic metro (I can see multiple sites) I couldn't reliably get a message to a friend in the same city. The lesson is that the hardware is better than the software at this point. And there's no use using it until they fix their software. [3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU
[3] I did some research on meshtastic and after finding and watching [2] I gave up on meshtastic, because it's clear that weren't super serious on routing algorithms, nor basic wikipedia reading. Version 2.6 maybe better, but there's a slew of nodes on 2.4 yet. And I don't want to bother with it anymore -- at least until they fix their reliability problems.
Sounds like a reinvented HAM radio club to me
I've been thinking about an idea, that maybe it would be worthwhile for a city to create a wireless network where it uses rooftops for a mesh.
This WiFi offers a low-data-rate (<5-10 mbit/s) service to seniors for free or a very low fee (~3€/month), without service guarantees, but honest best-effort.
In the case when an internet problem arises, which affects the city's it-infrastructure, the city can switch to this WiFi to have their city-wide services still interconnected, while the seniors get kicked off of the network during this time.
freifunk.net is building these mesh networks but based on volunteers without a fee. Big communities have thousands of nodes.
I think we should focus on collaboration, not just individual action. Many times, we don't react until a problem occurs. This reminds us to be proactive, not reactive.
I’m almost to the point of turning the internet off on purpose. The noise level is so high it’s almost not worth it anymore.
(but I get this is geared towards communication resilience)
As someone who has done a fair bit of playing with Meshtastic in the last few months, it's worth really managing expectations... it is in no way a replacement for any sort of internet. It's a way of sending very short text messages, with a system that is really quite flaky in any kind of built-up urban environment. Don't get me wrong, it's great fun, but there's a reason stuff like Ham radio is robust.
Why not something like WinLink which works over short and long distances using Ham Radio? It even has an email gateway.
Then, there is JS8Call, PSK, SSB, FM, etc
One thing I’ve been very curious about along these lines is troposcatter systems. These, depending on the bandwidth, power, and antenna size available, should allow you to get tens to hundreds of megabits over up to hundreds of miles with moderate sized dishes. The military has some of these systems, but I haven’t seen too much ham activity with them.
On a local level, I feel like we can probably do better than just text messaging capabilities. Mesh network covering the village, with someone running mirrors of essential services in their basement (local email routing, wikipedia, etc)
just remember that even that won't last long. Electricity is an expensive resource and you won't get spare parts to keep the Wi-Fi running for long.
At most you will only be able to start a few Android-phone hotpspots and share files. That is the reality of it.
Electricity is not really an expensive resource for communications. You need like a single rooftop to provide WiFi for the entire village.
Maybe for professional communications. For cases where the grid is gone, you will quickly see how quickly you stop using electricity for luxuries such as that one.
At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router running only on solar? Very seldom.
A mid range router uses about 10W or about a dollar a month.
It will not be a problem at all to power it completely on a small 100W panel.
And if it has a 12-volt input, there's a good chance that can work directly from a panel between about 9 and 15, possibly even up to 20 volts. Don't quote me on that - this isn't sound engineering advice, just an idea of something that might work. If it's a 5-volt input then it probably needs a pretty accurate 5 volts. Same for NUCs and so on (again don't quote me).
You can even use a (right-sized) lead-acid battery without a charge controller, as they're pretty resilient, unlike lithium-based batteries. This will both store power for night and stabilize the voltage. The lifetime would be a bit shorter. You can literally just parallel your solar panel, battery, and whatever you want to power, and it has a pretty good chance of working.
The price of solar panels and batteries keeps falling. You can go an Amazon today and get a setup that can power a switch/router/AP 24/7 in winter for a few hundred dollars.
It isn't about the price.
Try to avoid understanding this difficulty from your own shoes, but rather from the shoes of communities very limited on what is reachable to them from a technical, financial and logistical point of view.
I know you can solve it easily. I can solve it even more easily myself.
Now see any disaster area, see any remote area. Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations. Even as things settle, it is still more practical to share files directly with each other.
When you see from that perspective then you are on the domain of realistic solutions rather than keyboard level on virtual forum.
> Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations
The point here is to have it setup before the proverbial shit hits the fan.
Resiliency preparations are a fundamentally different ballgame to disaster recovery - you have more time and resources to prepare, your supply chains aren't broken yet, etc.
I don't disagree with that, but this point has nothing to do with the comment I replied to.
>...all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat
Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
I assume an allusion to when there was a coup in the 90’s in Russia the govt put the ballet on tv
This is fantastic. However, I only see the use case of messaging through the Meshtastic clients. Is there any other thing one can do over this setup, like Gopher or IRC?
I had seen a documentary about how people in cuba used lora devices to play multiplayer games, basically they made their own local internet.
people will try to design a plan to save humanity with Chinese radios, but won't sign up for a basic technician license. sigh
so many wrong assumptions on that article.
One thought -- more of a question -- and I'm not the first person to ask it -- How can we design a 'smaller' kind of internet? One that is less data hungry, less commercial, but still sustainable (how?), more of a community vibe, with distributed governance, less enshittification. Think of it like a maintainable garden. One that still works without a lot of extra effort, such as constant browser 'innovations' or bandwidth upgrades. Something more like a hardscaped garden instead of a typical American-style monoculture grass lawn requiring nonstop interventions to make it look pristine. This would have many benefits, including resilience, redundancy, and archival. Yes, I realize I'm conflating layers and maybe even asking too much. But sometimes it feels good to dream. At the very least, it is a genuine question I can use to evaluate various proposals and ideas in this general area.
The Gopher and (more recently) Gemini protocols are something like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/
Wouldn't having something like this, you automatically became a target in case of the case of war?
> a flood-forward mesh protocol
Is this scalable?
Valarie must be an AI powered roomba, don't fall for it fellow humans.
any people around Leuven, Belgium that want to start a club?
Really tiring to see Trump injected into everything. The accusation that Trump is going to cut off access to American software companies is fear mongering with no basis in reality
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GCP went down over a null pointer exception recently, taking down a good chunk of sites, and people claimed that it was the start of WW3, since obviously it would begin with an internet blackout - Meanwhile everyone is refreshing their feeds constantly to see the latest hypersonic missiles hit civilian houses in HD quality."war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria. People just write buggy software
> "war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria
It is until it isn't. Better not to write off these dangers and to just focus on keeping the general public in the dark to avoid mass hysteria, and treat these other threats with the required respect they deserve just in case.
At the beginning of COVID many countries had toilet paper shortages because of mass hysteria. Now imagine how ugly things would get if there wasn't enough food to go around. It's not that far fetched if there's a supply chain disruption. There's no secret food reserves at supermarkets, they sell products just-in-time.
If they do, they should also read commentary: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/25227/what-...
If you look more, you'll most likely find more discussions. The things on StackExchange are a bit lame. There was a blog somewhere that posted about climate data for about a decade and had a discussion going on for maybe 2 months... I don't know if can find that again. Soon after the discussion of that paper the blog was pretty dead...
I remember bank run being one of the reasons why SVB failed, and also during the COVID pandemic people rushing to buy toilet paper has a terrible effect on the market.
However I don't think these cases are anywhere close to the level of widespread disruption that the list of dangers can bring.
Do you happen to know instances where mass hysteria had a similar effect on disrupting global supply chains or communication services than war, geopolitics etc?
A bank run started by our esteemed VC brethren having a mass panic attack, then getting their own money out, then telling people they had a financial stake in to get their money out, et voila your bank is now running.
I tried to parse it by reading the intro and the conclusion. Is it trying to say some of the heating effects will be potentially saturated and limited when co2 increases, decreasing temperature? York and Princeton seem legit but don't know about how well received this is
They're saying "The effects of the first ton of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere is much higher than the effects of the next ton. Now there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that dumping any more into it will have a negligible effect."
The implication is "There's no need to worry about CO2 at this point, it's already done the damage it can, so let's call our global warming concerns off". But the models may be suspect (see my other post), so I wouldn't go celebrate just yet. Let's at least wait for peer review or submission to a notable journal to see how well received it is.
The essence is that each frequency alone is eventually saturated. (can't absorb more than everything). If you add more CO2 you'll start to absorb more in new frequencies, but the effect is getting smaller. To calculate how much the numbers add up, there is HITRAN-Database with a lot of data about the absorption lines.
About these calculations there's interesting material out there. I think there's even software to download, and feed with a download of HITRAN-Data.
Mass hysteria arguably belongs on the list of Bad Things, but I don't think it is as likely to knock out your internet or power supply for a prolonged period. Maybe more of a reason for a Toilet Roll Resiliency Club.
Mass Hysteria is seriously dangerous. A few years ago I've seen a full room of people applauding Military for ordering more tanks. ("Enough to have those shot down by Russia in the calculation"). And young German politicians being proud of it. They even said publicly "The best outcome of the Ukraine War would be reinstallment of the old German-Russian border."
Germany has the potential to go full Nazi again... And the population is mostly crazy in a scary way "We need sirens", "We need bunkers", "How can I make my pupils go for a career in the army"...
Instead of of investing time into making a mesh network. I'd like to see more energy spent on preventing real dangers. If people don't start going against the real troublemakers, loss of internet will be very low on the list of problems of the future.
And still nobody I've ever seen in public speak or comment about climate has ever read any paper on atmosphere physics... Before you build a mesh network against climate change, people should better read at least a few papers about atmosphere physics first.
Please explain yourself, downvoters!
Commenting on voting is against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). To understand why your comment fares as it does, helps to re-read the guidelines in their entirety.
I know why my comment was downvoted, and I know what the guidelines are. I wanted to know why people were downvoting adornKey's completely reasonable comment.
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No mention of starlink? Even if the internet is entirely down locally your packets could be routed to the other side of Earth before making it to the internet.
Starlink is much simpler for the average consumer to setup than what this article suggests.
The article is talking about the war in Ukraine specifically, and not only has the US repeatedly threatened to disable their starlink access if they don't agree to a treaty, Musk himself admitted to disabling starlink during a Ukrainian raid a couple of years back.
Resiliency isn't found by relying on corporations who are subject to interference by foreign nations.
I guess being dependent on the daily mood of some random guy in Texas isn't really resilience.
Well IMHO it is more about if the infrastructure is centralized or decentralized. In a centralized infrastructure we are all at the whim of someone like Musk/Gates fill in the ______
A mesh network and federated services will not rely on one actor or server. And if you are in middle of no where and only a random guy from Texas is hosting, then maybe start your own node if he is unreliable.
Sure, as a backup to your regular internet it could work, and can be shared with your community. However, the objective is to be independent from any infrastructure. The US has boycotted the ICC in the Netherlands already, if the ICC were to arrest American or Israeli war criminals they may choose to expand that boycot to the whole country, which includes Starlink access.
Can't rely on Elon in cases of an emergency.
nor during business as usual, which I think covers the total reliability of said person.
a pretty important part of everyone's strategic planning in 2025 needs to be resilience to random rich American cunts deciding to inflict harm on you or your country.
Another thing is to update mesh stack to more modern language, to improve security and resiliency - projects like B.A.T.M.A.N, Babel, OSLR, FRRouting, etc would largely benefit from being rewritten from pure C to language like Rust.
Being "modern" is a poor excuse. Code in C can be ported to anywhere, code in your "modern" language can only be understood by a few and is not portable anymore to other languages.
Please don't confuse security with resilience, they might be connected in some dots but have fundamentally different purposes.
Why? I mean... we had many "modern languages" that are not "modern" anymore, but the code in C still works, and when rust loses the "language of the week" status, the code in C will continue to be developed, and rust will be like go, ruby and others.
Because of the memory safety, better type system, and better infrastructure of testing. There's even no well-maintained property-based testing framework for C. Rust provides all of this out of the box or with popular crates.
Sure, multiple languages do that and many more will.... will you rewrite all the software ever written to any new language that has something new? The current code works.