punkgeek

Meshtastic is encrypted.

Encrypted digital transmission over Lora is legal in the US.

No ham license required. Much better range per watt. Slower. More modern protocol.

Hi! I'm one of the devs. If you have questions you might like our (friendly/helpful) forum: meshtastic.discourse.group.

we talked about it in the early but there were some fundamental technological limitations that made it seem like not a good fit. At this point I think meshtastic is more feature complete and has lots of areas not serviced by disaster radio (ie. python API, ports to many different types of lora boards, extremely good battery life).

I think the only feature we miss wrt disaster radio is dual radio support and full DSR.

yep - I'm one of the meshtastic devs and that was our thought as well.

* use off the shelf hardware, so user can just buy a finished device from China * make it cheap * Make something useful for people in general (without disaster) - then they will have it when the disaster happens.

ah! thanks!

sure! either chat on our gitter chat (link at www.meshtastic.org) or send me an email at [email protected].

we are careful to keep the esp clock-gated almost all the time (esp calls this light-sleep), in that mode the power draw of the ESP is on 1.5mA. When the radio (or button press) receives a packet it wakes the main CPU, which then services everything (turning on bluetooth as needed) and then goes back to sleep. If you are curious for more details we have a power consumptions spreadsheet in our docs.

also, adding support to dynamically probe for a GPS attached to GPIOs would be very straightforward (almost identical to the tbeam case). If you're interested in this ping us on the devchat and someone will help talk you through it.

yes. If your radio doesn't have GPS the phone will provide GPS updates to the radio. Everything is treated identially (though there will be a bit higher battery consumption on both the phone and the radio)

current battery life is about 3 days and will soon be eight days. See our power calculations spreadsheet, but with with scheduled broadcast intervals (because we have GPS time) it is fairly feasible to reach 30 days between charging.

I'm also a (retired, but formerly very active) paraglider and that was a big motivator for me.

a channel in this case is a set of friends who are on one common preshared key (and a hopping set of frequencies). So each mesh only cares about (or even sees) packets on that mesh.

Lora is quite a slow bitrate protocol (but it has _great_ range and super low power needs). So we are focusing on our smaller use-case at first (in the interest of speed of development and stability for users)