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Funny enough, I was just talking to my girlfriend yesterday about buying walkie-talkies. I'm a complete noob when it comes to radio and mesh networks, but 250 miles on low power sounds like magic. How hard is it to get started with something like this? What exactly do you need to buy? Is it just plug and play? Thanks for commenting
This will get you started: https://meshtastic.org/#hardware
I've purchased a couple through Muzi Works, but you can build your own from components pretty easily. There's a web-based flasher available that makes loading the firmware really easy: https://flasher.meshtastic.org/ and then just pair it to a device running the meshtastic app.
When I got started, I got a couple radios for a neighbor and local friend as well just to make sure there would be an actual mesh. Now I regularly pick up >50 local radios and at least as many from farther away as well.
This is exactly what I needed to read, thanks for inspiring me, I'll definitely take the plunge and start this new adventure :)
It does not matter how powerful your radio is, what matters is line of sight. When I stand on a mountain top with my handheld 8 watt radio I can reach like a hundred miles a way in multiple directions. When on the ground I barely make it 2 miles because of hills and trees. This is with GMRS
You should check out Reticulum. I'm not saying meshtastic is bad, but Reticulum is far superior. Meshtastic is not, or at least for a long time was not even encrypted despite their claims (no end to end encryption, used a shared key defeating the purpose), and meshtastic does have routing constraints and is limited to one type of harware LoRa. Reticulum works on any hardware and medium and does not care how limited the bandwidth is. Reticulum also offers end to end encryption.
As for bitchat, it basically is useless because it requires the use of a closed source spyware OS trackign device to use (android or ios "smartphone"), it simply does not work on linux making it not even worth consideration of existence in my opinion.
As for France, we should not celebrate filthy islamics and communists making use of our tools. But, freedom tech is for everyone.
I've been using my meshtastic radio lately and it's kind of crazy how far you can get across a mesh at low power using 900MHz. I'm regularly picking up radios 150 miles away (in other states), and sometimes as far as 250miles over 4 or 5 hops. If the protestors' cell phones could mesh on the other cellular frequencies as well, it would be a formidable network.