I've been using LoRa since 2014.
To this day, I have yet to find somebody to talk to 😂
Meshtastic hype 📶📴 https://video.nostr.build/dc92abf2328c44e09b284c7c6b71e6eb7002a473fc0f3633949ed24404dfc725.mp4
Video by EuroThrottle #meshtastic #freedomtech #raspberry #lilygo
Discussion
I installed bitchat about a week ago, and I'm looking for people who use it every day, nothing so far. But I'm in a small town, i had more chances in Paris or Bruxelles maybe.. 🤷♂️
It's becoming more accessible to everyone, and there's no longer any need to know how to code or to have specific rare hardware.
Despite this it's true that it's still a niche tech.
Weird, I got my meshtastic node in January and immediately saw 10 people in my area with devices and was able to talk to them.
Mind you, I think some wind messed with the antenna on our router, so it's been offline, and so I've not been able to connect with anybody recently. But up until then, I was totally able to, and when it's eventually fixed, I will be able to again.
That's just what happens when you're reliant on only one other device. When that device is gone or compromised, you're down until it's fixed. If I had connections to multiple devices, that wouldn't be such a problem.
So LoRa back in 2014 was about base stations relaying messages from IoT devices. During the years I was running base stations for SIGFOX and TTN. During that time I received no third party messages to relay.
I've been running meshtastic nodes for a few weeks now, both in my home in the Oxfordshire countryside which has seen no other nodes, other than through MQTT, which I turned on for a couple of hours and picked up 2,500 other stations.
So I brought my nodes to my home in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, where I saw about 5 other nodes. I've sent several messages, 1 confirmed message, but have yet to receive a reply after 3 days.
I think a lot of Europe is using meshcore instead of meshtastic, but I won't touch it because the applications used to access it are not open source.
The firmware is open source, and somebody could write an open source application for it, but since nobody has done so yet, I won't touch it.
Yeh, Andy Kirby is spearheading it.
It has some traction, but it's still mostly Meshtastic in Europe.