We have tested it successfully with 4 nodes last week at the Fusion Festival in Germany - one of those where you have to battle constant cellular network outages - and were surprised to randomly see fellow meshtastic users extending the mesh network. It was one of those "open source technology is amazing" moments :D.

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Super neat stuff.

Only if this comment can be preserved on the off-grid mesh ;)

Cool stuff, slick stuff, neat stuff.

I bet! I can imagine festivals being a good disaster simulation.

Meshtastic appears to use a simple flooding algorithm which is appropriate to what I understand to be the application - a small group of outdoorspeople keeping tabs on each other with short messages. One of my takeaways from a similar project I worked on in a past life was that flooding works well for use cases like that and just about anything more sophisticated is a pretty serious research project. BATMAN etc looks like fun to experiment with.

> what I understand to be the application - a small group of outdoorspeople keeping tabs on each other with short messages.

One really neat thing (in my opinion) about Meshtastic, it that it has support for GPS location in it's message scheme, so GPS equipped devices (or devices paired to phones with GPS on) can see where other mesh members are relative to them. This is really cool in the festival-type use case. Being able to easily see where your crew is whenever you want is great.

I have this same need and am preparing an evaluation of Meshtastic in the field this month.

I'm part of a volunteer EMS division within a paid fire department and we staff foot teams and medical carts at large events at our 90,888-capacity stadium (football, concerts, etc; well over 100k including tailgaters at our biggest game of the year) and music festivals with 10-40k attendees on the adjacent golf course.

While we have fancy Motorola APX 8000XE, our on-site dispatch wholly lacks visibility into unit locations and the abysmal cell service precludes software solutions leveraging mobile phones.

Doesn't Motorola have location tracking systems which integrate or add-on to their radio systems? I know we used to have this on some of our VHF radios.

You could also look at using APRS for location tracking...

Edit: Also - you should be able to set up your phones with priority network access on FirstNet, right?

>Doesn't Motorola have location tracking systems which integrate or add-on to their radio systems?

Yes, the APX8000 has support for location tracking but we decided it'd be inappropriate to request anything of the regional communications center since they have their hands full with far more meaningful improvements to the 12 cities (40-odd fire stations) they support. Also, while I see value in tracking unit locations at our music festival events in particular, it falls well short of necessary.

>You could also look at using APRS for location tracking...

APRS would require we all have technician licenses and suitably equipped 2M radios. While a few of us are hams, it's not feasible to request dozens of volunteer EMTs go through that. Also APRS tracker hardware is at least twice as expensive as LilyGo's LoRa options ($55 for a T-Echo or $65-85 for a T-Beam w/case and battery vs $115 for the cheapest APRS tracker I've found--QRP Labs' LightAPRS [1]--not including designing a case and power delivery).

>Also - you should be able to set up your phones with priority network access on FirstNet, right?

We are indeed eligible for wireless priority services on our personal phones. AT&T FirstNet includes data priority but the couple members who got it didn't see an improvement. Verizon Frontline offers data priority but no one's opted in yet and T-Mobile only offers voice priority so low confidence in its viability.

Fundamentally, Meshtastic's attractiveness is not only in its low hardware cost but the lack of friction in not requiring anything of anyone beyond "hey, clip this thing on your bag, thanks."

[1] http://qrp-labs.com/lightaprs

> APRS would require we all have technician licenses

If you were using the "normal" APRS frequency, but if you set up your own iGate, you could run it in the public safety band, couldn't you? (If you had a frequency licensed and coordinated of course.)

Alternately, you could get a business band license and run it there. In that case, each individual doesn't need a license, just an org.

Sure, I could coordinate or license a frequency and build or acquire radios to use APRS but why? It requires greater effort, risk, and expense for the same result as the off-the-shelf solution.

Burning Man is one of the the primary usecases of one of the core devs, so yeah, it should definitely get some good exercise in that kind of context. Another acquaintance is a PAX admin and looking into it for similar reasons.

I've not been following along too closely for the last couple of years (not a lot of need for or opportunity to use it in Covid lockdown times), but the original lead dev's most memorable (for me) main use case was for paragliding. Being able to see where your friends are (and who's in good lift) as a group of paragliders would be very useful. Having a reliable long-is range way of letting your friends know where you landed out would obviously be super useful as well.

I'd love to see a protocol designed for that sort of thing that hops from phone to phone without explicit intervention from the user.

No setting up a wifi hotspot and having people connect to you. No need to be connected to wifi at all. No fucking with Bluetooth.

I'm not even sure if there's a way to do it but that's what I really want. Carrying a separate LoRa device is just one more thing I'll forget to pack or charge.

You can do the same thing with Bluetooth LE, which everyone already has.

Low-bandwidth, but doesn't require any "human in the loop" to establish the mesh.

Bluetooth LE is aiming at something slightly different. When people say several kilometres with LoRa, they do mean in actual real-world applications.

Two LoRa transceivers with dinky antennas indoors will do > 1 km in a suburban environment. With a well-sited outdoor antenna for one of the transceivers that will increase to 5+ km. Two well-sited outdoor antennas can do 20+ km if they have line-of-sight.

There's nothing else quite like it at the moment. Cellular networks are close, but higher bandwidth, power, and of course, licensed spectrum. One could cover an entire large city with a LoRa network with a dozen well-placed nodes. Its most common application to date is along those lines, with utility meters and such.

I thought this thread was about trying mesh networking at a festival. Hence my suggestion to give Bluetooth LE a try.

LoRa can get you tens of kilometers line of sight, and sometimes over a hundred. What kind of reasonable distances can one get with BLE?

BLE Long Range mode can get somewhat over a kilometer line-of-sight, open-field range.

Is that something a typical phone can do though? Is it just a bluetooth config thing that a phone typically has access to modify, or is BLE Long Range a specific set of electronics/antennas that you won't find in your spare Samsung device?

I'm not a cell phone expert. Some, maybe most, recent cell phones should be able to do BLE LR with their bluetooth radio. It is a specific modulation scheme and it does require the BLE transmitter to be capable of particular power levels. It does not require a special antenna.

I've used Meshtastic as small (5000-ish person) festivals, and even with higher bandwidth settings and stock rubber ducky antennas, ground to ground ranges through trees and people of around 1km worked just fine (with the expected shadows behind hills). This was only a small number of devices, I have no idea how badly performance would drop off if 10% or 50% of the attendees were trying to tx/rx Meshtastic or LoRaWAN signals.

LoRa is designed to handle hundreds of devices in the same area since the commercial use case is densely deployed nodes. The spreading factor is orthogonal so it is able to multiplex in the same frequency assuming your data rate is constrained enough for the largest spread factor.

There's a bit more on involved with gateways and coordination that you don't get in P2P mode but the PHY has the pieces you need I'd you wanted to do something similar.

I wonder how hard it would ve to extend the Meshtastic code to send data via BLE phone to phone as well as LoRa.

It's usually done on an ESP32, so fixed repeaters can already handle it, and it would let you try it out without actually having the hardware.

100m vs up to 8km...

Over my decades of visiting Glastonbury I can report that cellphone coverage has gone from “it works for some calls but no data” to “perfect 3G data everywhere on site”. The cell phone infrastructure companies ship in lots of portable masts.

What about LoRa and Xray Satellite Comm? Couldnt you set up like noded repeaters as well for a ground back up / stronger signal along side as well? I have a bunch different arduino coding to do it, but finding a group of people to actually try to implement it wider scale deems to be harder than one would think. lmfao

they test this stuff regularly at festival and sporting events. i met a guy walking around outside lands with a suitcase full of phones. he was working for verizon to ensure the mobile base stations were appropriately powered