[wtallis]

How about you make an actual argument here in this thread, instead of vaguely gesturing at an excessively long newsletter and claiming there's relevant substance in there somewhere? Or at least tell me if I've incorrectly interpreted the "Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking" section as listing problems but no solutions aside from buying a radically different (more expensive and power-hungry) type of radio?

Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.

[hedgehog]

FWIW I have some background in this area and got curious how Meshtastic works so I read some of the docs and code. It seems like they are unaware of existing work even 20+ years ago, a specific suggestion is to study the state of single radio CSMA meshes in say 2005 and make a list of subjects to read on, then do that. There's a lot of stuff that happened later but in the early 2000s many people tried to make meshes out of 802.11b IBSS and a lot got written about those efforts.

[immibis]

All the information you seek is found in the article you stubbornly refuse to read.

[Groxx]

having read that meshtastic section: I mostly agree with their requests tbh. the only suggestions in there seem to be "use full duplex" (with approximately one reason why, though it's a good one) and "solve frequency discovery with SDR" which they've already addressed as somewhat ridiculous - because it is, for someone interested in a low power and low cost network.

particularly the SDR stuff, which is the VAST majority of that section. this is not at all the same target audience as meshtastic:

>A computer with “sufficient” compute power and RAM, to run the ka9q-radio software. KA9Q has stated that a Raspberry Pi 4 is sufficient, and now we have the Raspberry Pi 5 with up to 16 GB of RAM, for only $120.

that's like suggesting the way to fix a wireless problem is to use a wire. otherwise the criticism seems to summarize as "it's slow and bad" and well. okay? that's hardly constructive, whether or not it's accurate.

the whole thing reads like "the solution is left as an exercise to the reader ;)" because it sounds like it's written by and for people who are already experts and just want to read a cathartic list of flaws they already know. and/or "buy better hardware lol". it's not at all the logical slam-dunk that you seem to think it is.

[bb88]

Meshtastic can only use one frequency at a time. So, say, a battery status update can stomp on a message trying to get to a meshtastic router. (He's got the link to the hidden node problem with a great wikipedia article about it).

The more popular the network, the more frequent these message stomps happen. Flood routing makes these stomps more frequent.

There is also no end to end packet acknowledgement system like tcp, so at hop 3 (e.g.) if the message got stomped on, who would know?

Let's say someone made a dual band lora transceiver. Well that would help, but it wouldn't solve anything else, because there's still core routing/reliability/topology issues.

So if you had 20 channels to talk over, well that would be even better. The chance of having your message stomped on would go down significantly making the network much more reliable. That's the SDR part (the listening of 20 channels at once) vs the Lora chip which can only listen/transmit on 1 channel at once.

Edited to add:

"But that's super expensive hardware/engineering to do that!" you might say. Well, it's being done today.

The point is that if you can fit 20 1khz channels in a 20khz RF space. The 20khz RF can be converted into audio and fed into a soundcard and processed. This exists today with FT-8, though FT-8 uses 150hz bandwidth per stream in 2.8khz sections per band.

You can see some FT-8 activity by looking at some websdrs.

Maybe go here and tune to 14.074Mhz Upper Side Band (USB)

http://data3.caprockweather.com:8073/

Each vertical line is one message 150hz wide.

[wtallis]

I still don't see how your suggestions amount to anything other than telling people to spend a lot more money on completely different hardware and use it in a completely different manner.

FT-8 doesn't seem usefully relevant here. The fact that the bandwidth is so low that it can be sampled with a sound card isn't at all helpful when Meshtastic doesn't require a PC. And FT-8 carries minimal payload (typically amounting to no more than the automated status updates you dislike Meshtastic wasting airtime on), and I've never heard of anyone doing routing over FT-8. You're just making noise about a completely unrelated niche radio hobby.

If the constraints of LoRa and Meshtastic don't make it possible to implement the kind of radio system you want to play with, that doesn't prove that Meshtastic has made any wrong decisions. It just says you would get a more fulfilling experience from getting into a different radio hobby, and stop getting in the way of potentially productive discussions about how Meshtastic could be improved within the constraints of the currently-existing commodity hardware.

[bb88]

> FT-8 doesn't seem usefully relevant here. The fact that the bandwidth is so low that it can be sampled with a sound card isn't at all helpful when Meshtastic doesn't require a PC.

This is what I meant about adding noise to the argument. This isn't a useful argument. FT8 could be decoded with a microcontroller. But you wouldn't know that. And it only shows your ignorance of the subject.

Meshtastic maximalists are the true believers, throwing away the decades of experience and knowledge because they drank the kool-aid of the leaders that think they are smarter than the folks who have been doing this for the last 40 years.

[immibis]

Why does this pattern come up so often? Something is promoted ignoring the lessons of the past and claiming not to have those problems, then it's discovered that it does have those problems and that ostriching didn't solve them (surprise) and that ostriching made it even worse than if they'd left a TODO placeholder

[immibis]

The message would be 20 times longer (in time), increasing its chance of collision by 20 times and exactly cancelling the 20 times reduction that it gets from randomly selecting one of 20 channels.

[bb88]

If you're monitoring 20 channels, which you would need to do anyway, you'll know which channels to transmit on.

[immibis]

But that's also true on 1 channel. Doesn't solve the hidden node problem. You have 1/20 as much risk of starting to transmit at the same time on the same channel as someone else, after you both determined the channel was clear, since that's a race condition with a fixed time window per transmission, but is that the main cause of collisions?

[Groxx]

yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to as "use full duplex" (use at least 2 frequencies, I agree this sounds like pretty solid critique (particularly with meshcore's network setup) and wouldn't make hardware dramatically more expensive) and "buy better hardware lol" (use 20+ frequencies and make it a completely different product at a MASSIVE price increase. why not just suggest wires then).

so there's one bit of probably-usable advice (slightly raise cost for significant benefits) and one that completely misses the point (charge at least 5-10x more for wildly different hardware, use hundreds of times more power, etc). the article spends several times more text on the latter.

flood routing and lack of end to end ack I also agree with, I sincerely doubt those are the best options and if user complaints are any sign then I think it's an existence proof that it doesn't scale, exactly as predicted. neither are part of that article, though it is in a linked also-large mastodon thread, which has basically just one constructive suggestion (8x the channels, though they don't think it'll work either) and many "this sucks" examples (flood fill, hop limit, etc. it amounts to "do better", not "X is better, learn from it").

[bb88]

> charge at least 5-10x more for wildly different hardware, use hundreds of times more power, etc

So I think what's super interesting is that it not necessarily need to be 5-10x more, nor needs hundreds of times more power.

I'll start with the power argument first.

WSPR (pronounced "whisper") often uses 100mW transmissions and can be heard across the globe in the HF spectrum. The techniques for reception can pull the signal out of the noise. It's common for weather balloons to send telemetry this way. People use it to monitor band conditions as well.

The trick is that WSPR puts all the power into one signal approximately 6hz wide. That's why it's so efficient, and one reason why it can be heard across the globe with such low power. Now you're probably not going to get that distance in the 900Mhz ISM band, but you will be heard further if you so choose (or need to be).

As per cost?

100mW assuming a 75ohm antenna (dipole) is 36mA of current. For 1W (which is roughly the ISM limit) it's 115mA of current, so the components won't need to be high power, probably jelly bean parts.

The RTLSDR is $25 bucks with 2.4Mhz bandwidth which is way overkill for this.

Lots of microcontrollers are cheap.

There's engineering cost and time, sure, but Meshtastic did show that a need for reliable mesh low power messaging exists even if it's not the final form.