Setting Up MESHTASTIC Off Grid Communications! 

I wish you could still buy them

I want to say ham radio concepts or The Comms Channel has done a guide for a micro vnc. But more is better here.

I struggled to find a simple how to guide yesterday while making my first antenna. Ended up guesstimating 86.4mm 😅 going to take another whack tomorrow now I know this is here. Thankyou! :)

I have both a little vna like that one and a rigexpert. Rigexptert made just tuning an antenna a lot easier where the vna suffers from a lot of projects I have seen where trying to cram too much in it behind too many menus when most people just need it for one or two basic tasks most of the time. I think my big service analyzer has a vna in it. Has everything else but still figuring it all out. IFR 1600.

Hams use nano VNA a LOT, and there are many many very well presented instructional videos online 🙂

That should be a dynamic feature of the software and other equipment should build up a list. Don't forget Radio Amateurs have had the Packet Radio network since 1988 using TNCs over radios. LoRA software could be developed a lot as most of the errors were made with amateurs and fixed.

Regardless of protections in place, it should still be encouraged to not power up such a device without an appropriate antenna.

No one uses KM in the UK, we are still in Miles and Miles per Hour, we also use GBP or £ as currency, not Dollars or $ as people from the UK often start quoting incorrectly.

Save yourself the trouble, print your own notebooks with small font and several magnifying glasses. There are far too many failure points in any of the computers I have seen for this purpose. If you are going that route, a pelican case with two cheap laptops, some thumb drives and two battery banks would be much safer.

Yes I am! Thanks rog n

And thanks to both of you, I've got a pair of Heltecs on order so soon there will be a pair of nodes in the Buckingham area.

Thanks, it’s moorside edge

I wondered that too. Hopefully more nodes will also allow for more capacity even if they act as buffers.

Read my mind

No, people would just start using more frequencies.

And easily jammed.

Nope. If you get the right meshtastic bits they're 256 bit encrypted. They won't be found/jammed because they run on the same frequency as smart phones.

@@ireuel357 In world war 2 an unexpected transmitter could be located easily and was first assumed to be an enemy agent. Also codes were broken in WW2 so I doubt that codes would be unbreakable in WW3. This would simply be passing a coded message = spying for an enemy, and gets you imprisoned.

Test the antenna on a radio with SWR meter! If it works on 2m it will work on 70cm as they are directly related. If it doesn't work on 70cm then it can not be a reputable retailer.

can u tell me what a prepper is please ?

@@onedayagogo Someone who prepares for a disaster. Usually it involves hoarding lots of tinned food, and in the case of the paranoid Americans, lots of guns and ammunition to stop everyone else stealing the food.

So did I - but mine was a week ago, they are in UK Customs right now!

I had a Heltec V2 but then ordered a couple of V3s which arrived a few days ago.

I thought the same, as you’d expect, I put one on glass with the same results. But yeah you’re right

It makes NO difference unless the glass has some metallic coating or you put it near a metal frame. On glass it makes no difference to RF.

@@Bond2025 the dielectric constant of pcb board material does impact the rf performance of the tracks on it... if you stick a wire (or aerial) onto glass that is effectively a 4mm thick circuit board, dielectric constant possibly around 4.8. OK the effect is quite small but it can have some effect.... It is just like dipoles made with insulated wire & ininsulated wire have slightly different resonant freqs.

Textbook. Well done

It was always super important. People in Eastern Europe were building simple diode AM receivers, despite there was a death penalty for using such device.

hi mytube4utoo, have you become a flat earther yet? If not I suggest viewing the 13 part series _what on earth happened_ in my about to learn how the earth is not a globe

@@oscarleijontoft Not at all what I asked and not at all a helpful answer. Hoping Lewis will chime in with what he knows.

433 is inside the HAM band in North America, making encryption on it illegal (🙄), 915 I thought was also safe for North America.. but I should maybe do research myself on the subject. 😅

​@@SpookyLurker 915 is safe for encryption and no license is required in the US.

​@@richerich853I was only concerned about whether 915 was North American or for another area of the world. Cheers from the Great White North!

I think they probably are the same unit, yes. I know that my Heltec can be configured to be 868 or 915 depending on where you are. I have mine configured for 868 for her ein the UK. There seems to be another version which does 915 to 925 or something like that but I don't know anything about that other than AliExpress listings!

RF circuits should be in a metal and grounded enclosure. I intend to line one of the Bender cases with a stick on foil and grounding it. I will also use an adapter to add some filtering to the end of my USB power lead before it is plugged in.

NFR52

@@paulsengupta971 I know but it might not be as powerful as c6 and nrf does not have WiFi. Additionally esp32 has native support of LVGL, which makes the screen integration much easier. And... if the code is in esp-idf, it is really transferable between s3 and c6.

I’ve done one ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-D0BVtQ6y5Rc.htmlsi=XI2sMGSY9quu-iQT

Yep, there a lot of junk parts being sold now the hype is in full swing 😑

No you’d lose all or most the signal you need a dedicated 868’mhz antenna

@@RingwayManchester I figured as much. I guess I'm mounting one up at the bottom of the the discone's mast, then. But a 915 antenna, in my case

The loss on the coax is too great, most of the signal will be lost unless you have LMR400 or Heliax. You could get a plastic box and put the PCB in , then use a very short piece of coax and a long USB lead to power it. You would be better off getting a 2inch wide piece of plastic pipe, sticking the board and a 868MHz aerial inside at the top under an end cap, then running a thick USB cable down to power it, or use a thick power lead joined on to a USB plug. Forget the discone, it's not a very good design of antenna. You are better using a dedicated 868MHz antenna. If you are high enough, look at the plans for a Slim Jim and scaled them for 868MHz, make it from a piece of copper wire and connect it to a pigtail and use this inside the pipe with the circuit board. This gives a much better local coverage than those fake "high gain" colinears on sale. I used a SJ on 1090MHz and it was only about 18cm long and 1cm wide. Get experimenting. With LoRa there is no advantage with high gain aerials as they have a much higher angle of radiation, so useless for local blanket coverage compared to the Slim Jim.

No

They can be around 100mWatts. Enough to get in to a bigger RF amp.

The people with a radio in the car or backup power at home will be the only ones able to have much of a conversation. I wonder how low the noise floor will be in an country wide power cut for example. CB might sound like it did 40 years ago and not be so bloody noisy,

Don't see the point, it was like when my local substation broke and the whole area was without power. Massive groups of people took to the streets with torches walking up and down. Very very odd behaviour. Everyone will just be asking what happened and block the network completely.

The major advantage with these devices is extremely low power consumption with batteries that lasts days if not weeks. Add a solar charger to a node and you have until the components break down. It also runs encrypted on low output on a civilian frequency band with loads of other non com devices so not a high priority for EW units to jam. Will it cover a nation? Not realistically no, not unless you route it thru the internet but it will cover a neighborhood/city and one HAM radio nerd is bound to have long rage com's to relay if needs be but that runs a higher risk of interception or jamming.

@@Neruomir You need a solar panel, a charge controller and a big battery and a place to put the antenna as high as possible so an ideal location. And then still the range is probably half to 1 KM at most 2 realistic range in a suburbian area. And hooking it up to the internet is of no use because the internet will be gone if we really need this solution so it gotta work in mesh mode. But how likely is it that people will have all that to keep it running. ? You would need agreements and alot of planning to get garantueed coverage, not a bunch of hobbyists, that is just not going to work.

I dug my cybiko sets out, unfortunately leaky batts have destroyed them

Almost the same, they were a PDA with a walkie talkie function and could send data and work in a mesh system. Not sure of the frequencies they used now. I was wondering if a patent had died off. I remember some models of mobile phones also had a PTT feature to talk to others locally.

I tell you what then, send me your info and every penny I get from Meshtastic you can have. Prepare to be disappointed (there’s not a penny)

It's not the same thing, you need to consider they are only around 100mWatts RF output. On 868MHz that doesn't go far in a built up area, it needs to be high up or using a really good aerial, or both. Walkie talkies can be 5Watts RF and work down nearer 440MHz. RF at different frequencies works very different in different locations. My favourite band in 4M or 70MHz for base to mobile coverage, nothing beats it! DABradio should have used that band.

But your 90 year old grandmother probably isn’t 😂

Loads on AliExpress that come in a week or 2

@@RingwayManchester 'Local' German warehouse had a message on their website about Lilygo making changes to the T-Deck, hence the respupply being delayed. Not sure AliExpress is the way to go at this moment (not to mention that the T-Deck on AliExpress is about 20 euros more expensive with prolly non-existing warranty). I'm gonna start with 2 Heltec V3's and wait for local to stock to get replenished :D

Thanks so much!

About £45

That it does!

You can turn it on and off

Great, exactly what I need.@@RingwayManchester

Well once you have it, you don’t need any network or signal. It works

It communicates with the LoRa unit over Bluetooth.

fren, if u listen closely enough, his comments were actually referring to "who he was talking to", not "who he was talking about". but as usual the unscrupulous mass mind control media used it to try and score points. they are evil little gobblins working behind the scenes. they don't care about any of us. at all...

I've not seen any out of stock on AliExpress.

What about it?

ElectroMagnetic Pulse. Created by a nuclear explosion. Destroys semiconductors, electronic chips etc over a fairly big range unless they are protected inside a Faraday cage.

Faraday cage x 3

@@johnbaldwin143 yeah right, this helps greatly against any form of radiowaves XD Why even bother with jammers if people accomplish it themselves 😹👍

Just use an emp proof box

Will work apart from not being able to use any antenna, so defeats the object slightly. You may not know when (if) EMP will occur hence will be prone to destruction like any other electronic device.

@@prebenlohse1684 Keep a spare PCB wrapped in foil or some form of Faraday cage.

@@manicminer4573 I’m not a prepped at all and find the notion somewhat strange. I’ll keep my electronics connected as I do not see the scenario where I need to go to that length as very likely.

@@prebenlohse1684 is it even possible to protect antennas against EMP ? won't everything just get fried anyway ?

Now you’re talking

Not always useful.

It's very short range though and often gets affected by noise.