Hello Meshtastic!

This past Christmas, Papa Noel gifted me with two Meshtastic devices. I received a Lilygo T-Deck Plus, the Blackberry looking thing, and a Heltek LoRa 32.

What is Meshtastic? Its a low-cost, open-souce way to create a decentralized, wireless network that lets people (and computers) send messages and other data without cell service of Wi-Fi. 

Meshtastic can be used to communicate in remote areas (e.g. wilderness), enviromental monitoring (livestock, wildfire, temperature/rain fall), back-up communications (at music festival, cell service down), etc.

For me, I'm looking to understand how these sorts of open-source, low-cost technologies might answer:

• Can we keep connected easily without relying on a corporate-run network?
• How to keep local family and friends connected in case of disaster, remote locations, hackers bringing down local cell-service, etc?

Low-Cost, Long-Range Wireless Network

You can pick-up a Heltek LoRa 32 for under USD 20 and connect with folks many km/miles way. Using more larger antennas, Redditors have claimed a range of over +330km (+200 miles), between Italy to Slovenia.

Downside: Meshtastic is very slow

What's the catch? Due to government restriction and the frequency used, it's slow...it's not for videos, audio, images, and barely functional for long-form texts. (The software is also buggy, but I'm sure it'll improve.)

If you happen to live in the United States (and some other locations), you can use Wi-Fi HaLow devices to connect with others over 1km away at speeds fast enough for video streaming. It uses the 902-928 mhz band, which is available in the US but closed off in other regions like the EU.