It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat.
I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
I'd love to get a node working just for fun. But it also seems like a waste since I'm extremely rural. The closest node is 200+ miles away. The chances of seeing any other device but my own connect to it seem slim.
takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.
Perhaps there are others in your neighborhood in the same position, who would only get into it if there were other nodes. So be the first, get your friends into it, and maybe more nodes will follow. It's only $30 or so for a device.
They have a decent range (15 miles or more) so depending on how rural you are, you might be able to create a line of repeaters back to a major population center.
Lol, I'm rural enough that the concept of "neighborhood" has no meaning here. I'd have to have a neighbor first. And friends all live further away than 15 miles.
I literally just put the meshtastic antenna on the roof today, in an old services box. Been in the window for months, had a few weird perfect weather moments show a few nodes and a ping. Put it on the roof, hours ago, nothing yet.
Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).
Set it up, and when family visit, give them little LORA pucks to strap onto their belts when they go out on the property. Boom little property wide messaging network. Send out a text when dinner's ready!
I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum).
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.
And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
I vaguely remember reading an article where someone had somehow transmitted digital signals over HAM, could feasibly be a transport for a reticulum network, right?
I'm sorry but are you serious? That map shows 224 nodes in the world, fewer than 30 in the entire Western hemisphere. And only 24 in the world are using LoRa? Meshcore has 38,000 nodes, Meshtastic 10,000. Those two projects can actually be said to have "tons" of nodes.
It hurts your credibility. I trusted you, spent time trying to debug the map, thinking that something was wrong on my end... why am I only seeing 224 when there should be "tons", is there a filter, are these just super nodes....
So I looked into it because of what you said, but you raised expectations so much that I feel nothing but disappointment.
that map on rmap.world is only showing nodes that run dicoverable=yes in their configurations or something like that.
based upon the announce stream coming through my local node, i am seeing around 14k unique identities advertising over 21k unique application endpoints (destinations) over the course of the past month or so that i’ve been tracking it.
https://rmap.world/
It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.