Comment by wao0uuno

Comment by wao0uuno a day ago

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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.

TeamMCS a day ago

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)

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  • lormayna 4 hours ago

    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.

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adrianN a day ago

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.

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  • wao0uuno a day ago

    Almost everyone has one of these running 24/7 already. Second one with an external antenna wouldn’t make much difference.

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    • Aachen 20 hours ago

      Everyone currently has electricity on demand

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      • wao0uuno 19 hours ago

        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.

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  • apitman 13 hours ago

    Yes but in exchange you get way more bandwidth. No idea whether it would be enough to run a city-scale text network though.

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    • bigfatkitten 12 hours ago

      With a range of maybe 100 metres line of sight, if you’re lucky.

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GardenLetter27 a day ago

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.

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  • moffkalast a day ago

    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.

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    • edent a day ago

      Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • moffkalast a day ago

        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.

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    • bandoti a day ago

      Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything possible!

      Reply View 1 reply
      • moffkalast a day ago

        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?

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    • pyrale 21 hours ago

      > 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.

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      • pmontra 19 hours ago

        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.

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      • ahartmetz 14 hours ago

        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.

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        • pyrale 3 hours ago

          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.

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bigfatkitten 13 hours ago

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.

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  • apitman 13 hours ago

    > 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?

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cedws a day ago

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.

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  • wat10000 a day ago

    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.

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    • econ 16 hours ago

      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.

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      • wat10000 15 hours ago

        What is by design? Battery life? Poor battery life? Good battery life?

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  • PokemonNoGo 16 hours ago

    I don't think they themselves need to implement it. During the Hong Kong protests in 2019 they used apps like Bridgefy.

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  • roguecoder 18 hours ago

    Blackberry had one, but it didn't seem to be a feature consumers particularly cared about when they fled to iPhones.

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UltraSane 21 hours ago

Meshtatisc's routing is extremely primitive and inefficient.

https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...

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  • nullc 11 hours ago

    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

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