Comment by estsauver

Comment by estsauver a day ago

7 replies

* 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.

MaKey a day ago

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.

  • estsauver a day ago

    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.

amenghra a day ago

Starlink mini has a monthly cost, right? So it wouldn't be just ~250€ but more like 250€ + 50€/mo.

  • messe a day ago

    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-...

    • 0x445442 21 hours ago

      If the internet is down how do you unpause the service?

      • messe 21 hours ago

        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.

  • fragmede a day ago

    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.