Hey man, I've seen the meshtastic crowd showing these things off, and I'm aware what they do, but how does this practically help you in your life to set these types of things up? I'm curious if it's just a toy or if I could find good use in my life for things like this.
Discussion
I figure it's a toy until it's not.
It's a toy until a hurricane comes and knocks out power for several days.
It's a toy until you're going to go to a big stadium event or something like that.
I'm a big ham radio person and I figure it's better to have it and not need it but know how to use it than to need it and not have it.
It's very much like Bitchat, but with much longer range.
The geo hash thing is cool and all, but that still requires the internet, which at least somewhat defeats the purpose.
What's the range per power consumption on these types of devices? And bitrate?
For two devices communicating at ground level, you can expect a half mile to about a mile.
If you can get connected to a router, though, at some height, you can get a seriously good distance.
There's a guy in my local area who's 17 miles away who had his node 30 feet up on a pole and was communicating with our router 200 feet up on a tower from 17 and a half miles away.
I think the farthest achieved distance is over 300 km, mountain top to mountain top.
As far as bitrate goes, the default long fast is like 1.9 kbps and I think the short fast is like 10 kbps. There's a faster setting called Short Turbo, that's like 20K BPS, but it's not available in all regions due to legal restrictions, so I don't count it.
As far as power consumption goes, they are stupid low. Without GPS, and with boosted gain turned off, I get over 3 days on a device with a 700 mAh battery and the NRF52840 chip. The ESP32 devices use quite a bit more power, but all of these nodes are easily chargeable with a 5W solar panel.
You can put up a node on a tower with like four 18650 batteries and a five watt solar panel and the damn thing will never die until its damaged by the elements like lightning.
This sounds really cool actually. I'd be interested I'm acquiring some cheap for simple device to device and low bandwidth communications. Weather stations, time keeping servers, intercoms and things like that.
It's text and data only, no voice. So, depending on what kind of intercom you mean, it might not work for that. But weather stations and other sensors like that, it's perfect for.