I’m new here but have had the chance to meet a few of you in the hack space which has been rad. I’ve been playing with alternative communication systems for the past few months and have delved deep into a project called MeshCore. If you have heard of a project called Meshtastic its a similar idea with a bit of a different deployment. MeshCore uses Lora radios to create an end to end encrypted mesh for text communications. If you have a Meshtastic radio, it likely can be re-flashed with MeshCore firmware if you were interested to join the project.
MeshCore is a new Lora based project that has a lot of promise for stable off-grid mesh networks. I’m working with the Surrey Amateur Radio Club (SARC) to put up a repeater at one of their sites in Surrey and am looking to make contacts with other clubs to see if similar repeater sites could be established in the lower mainland. I’ve been talking with the VHS board and would also like to put up a repeater and room server at VHS to join in on this network in the coming weeks. It’s still growing but so far the project has been pretty exciting.
If you have questions please feel free to reach out, I am happy to share what I know so far. You can also probably find me on a Tuesday or Thursday working on a repeater build or 3d printing cases for radios. If there is enough interest I would be more than happy to do a workshop on MeshCore for everyone. Looking forward to meeting more of you.
some minor concerns raised among the directors were:
when you go up onto the roof have someone help with the ladder for safety.
make sure you’ve left a detailed talk post/wiki article about equipment left up there.
Try not to breach the building’s envelope when installing (ex. don’t drill a hole through the roof).
who retains ownership of the equipment in this case?
Personally i think it’s better to ask the membership as a whole on their opinion on this matter. I’ve been told there is already a ham radio antenna up there so there shouldn’t be too many objections to that. A good idea would be to attach a poll to this talk thread to gauge interest. I think this is better a VHS general consensus thing vs. a director decision type thing.
Happy to put together a post about the equipment that will go up on the roof. Totally planning on having some help and not doing this solo, safety first always. The plan for the antenna tripod mount is that it will be non penetrating so no holes are required on the roof. I will be donating the repeater and mount to VHS.
The youtube video in the thread explains a bit about why MeshCore. Meshtastic has some issues with scalability and messages not being received as the mesh grows, some meshes circumvent this using MQTT but this defeats the whole purpose of building an off-grid mesh since that requires internet. MeshCore focuses on being RF only and optimizing the amount of traffic being broadcasted to have better stability. A lot of meshes in UK and Europe that were Meshtastic are all converting to MeshCore now because of the stability.
In my own experience I found Meshtastic frustrating cause it seems like its working but messages don’t go through and coverage can be deceiving because of MQTT if you enable it. I keep one Meshtastic radio for fun but I rarely use it. Been more focused on building out MeshCore network so that more people can take advantage of it.
Radios are fairly inexpensive though so for your own personal adventures why not get two and play with both
This sounds very cool, I’d love to learn more about it and ideally play with it. Do you have any intro resources for it? I know about a bit about Lora, but no hands-on experience
It is pretty cool, there are some links above. to the main project site and intro video. I’d also be happy to chat about it and show you some of the radios if you’re in the hack space this week. Planning on coming in Tuesday and Thursday.
The site you a referencing is for HAM radios, the Lora radios that MeshCore and other mesh projects use don’t fall under that cause they operate in unlicensed bands; for north america its in the 900MHz range which was used by cordless phones and other unlicensed wireless devices.
From a legal and liability perspective I don’t believe there is anything that could be held against VHS, the devices do not store any data on them. The repeater just rebroadcasts traffic that it hears.
Just a followup to the liability question: unlicensed bands are operated on a “no interference, no protection” basis.
What that means is that you don’t need a license to operate in the band, but you can’t cause interference to anyone else, and you also don’t get any help if someone else is causing interference in the band.
In licensed bands, there is some government enforcement that could theoretically happen if someone is causing interference on your assigned frequency.
Just a heads up that we do get rooftop grafitti artists on occasion (on the flat front part of the roof). I can’t imagine they’d mess with an antenna though. Looking forward to more about this project. Cheers!
Good to know, thanks for the heads up Janet. There won’t really be a lot for them to mess with. the radio is pretty compact and its going to go up on a 3 foot antenna tripod secured with cinder blocks so we dont have to penetrate into the roof or anything and it can be disassembled easily.
