Hello and welcome to Live like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your hostess today, Brooke Jackson, and I'm here with James and Chia and they're going to be talking about mesh radio. But before we get into that, we would like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts by playing jingle from one of our friends on the network. Jingle goes here. Kite Lane is a weekly 30 minute radio program focusing on issues in the prison system. You'll hear news along with stories from prisoners and former prisoners, as well as their loved ones. You'll learn what prison is, how it functions, and how it impacts all of us.

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Have you ever pondered the origin stories of the crust punks playing banjo on the street for money with dirty dogs and impeccable teeth? Have you ever been curious about the guy with the disintegrating black T shirt who works at the collective cafe and still manages to travel Europe for six months without a trust fund? Ever wanted to know what it's like to live in a dilapidated house with 11 people, five dogs and one cast iron skillet? Hi, I'm Kat Rea and on my podcast Punctures, I'm going to be talking to all my weird friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends about the hustles we self proclaimed punks participate in to keep our funny little lives chugging along. Pot farms, clinical trials, crime scene cleanup, ice castle building, beet harvesting, and so much more. You've probably never heard of us, but we can be pretty fun to listen to, find punk chores, or wherever you find your podcasts.

And we're back. Welcome.

Hi everyone. Yeah, welcome. Thank you, Brook. Magnificent transition. Ciao. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I guess today we're going to talk specifically about mesh radios, right? So to start off with, I know you're a member of Signals Rising, which is a. A radio collective. Could you explain like a little bit about what, What's a mesh radio? How is it meshing? What's it meshing with?

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, James. It's a Pleasure to be here with you. You know, unless you're a total Luddite, most likely you're using mesh networks in your daily life. If you ever used like a WI fi access point repeater. Right. This is part of a mesh network. And WI FI signals are all a part of the radio realm as well. But I think we're probably going to be speaking more specifically about meshtastic, which is a growingly popular form of mesh radio communications. It's built upon the Internet of things band, the ism band of the radio spectrum. So the radios are low power. They're able to go for a very long range with that low power. And the radios have been mass produced for the Internet of things, which are your smart refrigerator or, you know, your water meter. And these are mostly using systems on the Lora Wan network. Right. So lora is short for long range and wan is means wide area network. Right. So meshtastic is built using those radios, so it's license free. You can do interesting things like encryption with them. You can build a network with radios that cost as little as like seven to ten dollars and communicate with your community citywide if you want to. And people are building regional networks right now as well.

Yeah, it has a lot of advantages over like, like people I think will be familiar with ham radio. Right. And the various other like ham being part of the radio band. But like people will be more familiar with like ham style radios, I guess. Right. Either handheld like, or with like a full, with a base station and antenna. Can you explain like how meshtastic communication is a little different from that? Right. Like the way you can, you're not like necessarily like logging on and saying your call sign and talking to a boomer in Kansas.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the radios are very small. Right. And they're also digital based. So this communication systems for text messaging or sending small data packets transmitting, you know, at a bit rate of like one kilobit, if you know, you got any millennials here, you remember, we'll remember kilobit rates. And everyone else is in the megabit and gigabit realm. So it's for very small data packets and it's not for audio, right? Yeah, if people are familiar with baofengs and things like that. These are primarily for ham licensed folks. And meshtastic is low power and it fits in like a nice little zone that, that it's kind of very much open on the radio spectrum for wide use.

Yeah. So like an average mesh tastic radio. I've got a couple here. Like I'm trying to think of. It's about the size of a packet of cigarettes, I guess would be, would be a good descriptor.

Sure, yeah. I mean the radio itself is the size of a quarter or a nickel.

Yeah, yeah.

You can use larger antennas, external antennas, things like that. And you know, it operates in the same way as any radio system, whereas if you get an antenna higher up, you're going to get wider area of coverage. That's why you see all the cell phone towers way up high on mountaintops. This is how you build a wide area network. And yeah, folks have been setting up infrastructure nodes for, for meshtastic systems around the country and around the world. And they're pretty easy to build because they're so low power that they can run on a small battery pack and a small solar panel and kind of run indefinitely.

Yeah, that's one of the big advantage of them because every radio in the network, or I guess most radios in the network, you could have them not doing this. But for the most part, most radios are going to repeat a signal they receive forward. Right. So you don't have to have like necessarily a direct line of sight to the person you want to communicate with so long as there are other radios along the route. Is that right? Or other mesh.

That's right, yeah. The general configuration of a meshtastic radio will automatically repeat any messages that are transmitted in the same modulation frequency. And I'm getting, you know, a little wordy and technical all of a sudden. I'll try and avoid it. But if your radio can hear a message, even if it can't decrypt it, it's going to retransmit it.

Yeah. So that I think that decryption part is really important. Like if people are thinking about repairedness or they're just like, there are a million reasons to want your communications not to be like publicly available for people to read. Right.

Like yeah, everyone uses signal, which is a great tool for communications. Meshtastic has a similar end to end encryption system. And you can have chat groups where everyone has the common encryption key that are in that chat group. Right. But the radios themselves, they don't need to decrypt the message to be able to retransmit it. That's how you're able to send a message through signal that goes through the Internet and ends up at someone's phone.

Right.

It's traveling through the Internet encrypted. And then the phone at the end for the person receiving it is the device that's decrypting It.

Right. Yeah. So in this case, I could message you and it could bounce or it could be repeated by Brooke, who presumably has a meshtastic repeater. And Brooke would not be able to read that message unless Brooke was part of our little group and had the key.

Sure.

A lot of these other, like, you can encrypt on, like, a regular radio. Right. Like, you can get a license and you can encrypt on, like, a bao thing. Maybe you can't encrypt on it. I think you can program it like a Motorola. You could encrypt on.

You sure can. Although the FCC is not a fan of it. It's sectioned off certain areas of the radio spectrum. Like private businesses can license single frequency in their area and do encryption. You know, maybe that's like the local elementary school, you know, or, you know, the. The guys doing road repair work or your local police station. Right. So they're. They're able to do encryption with the permission of the fcc. With your Baofeng, you can do it as well, but you're not legally allowed to through the FCC's regulations.

Yeah. And to get that license is, like, prohibitively expensive, Right. It's something like 400 bucks. Is it? To get the encryption license?

Yeah, 500 bucks. Yeah. But if you, you know, if folks are using, you know, handheld in a local area, you know, think about, like a taxi service, you know, for a local area, you can have, you know, handhelds work with a one repeater in a neighborhood and do that kind of encryption and that. That can be good for, you know, one organization or something like that. But when you're trying to create a network that's. That's accessible to a lot of folks, it doesn't really work out. And so that's. That's where folks that have been implementing Meshtastic, so they can have, you know, their groups that are going out to, you know, a protest or hiking or something like this, where they're off the grid or they want to be off the grid, not bringing their cell phones, but stay in communication with folks. They're able to do that with the meshtastic device. Now, most. Most. Most of these Meshtastic devices, you're connecting through your phone's Bluetooth to, and you're sending messages through the meshtastic app, which controls your radio through Bluetooth, or. And the radio sends that message that your phone's telling it to. But there are other standalone devices that have a little keyboard. Think about, like, the old school Palm Pilots, things like that. That can just run meshtastic locally and you can just send your messages through that with a little screen and keyboard.

Yeah, yeah. It feels like a BlackBerry from back in the day. Yeah. And then like the form factor is exactly the same. I saw recently there was a big protest in Serbia, right. And I saw like on the, on a meshtastic forum I was on or something that people had all taken their mesh radios and like they had like been chatting while they were there. Which is definitely a cool use of it. If someone wants to get into this, like how would they go about it? It's not like ham, right. You don't have to go and start by getting a license and all that stuff. Like how would you begin with. With meshtastic?

Yeah. I mean you can get a radio on any number of websites for 20 to $30. Connect with your phone to it, you'll go to the meshtastic.org website and you can update the firmware on the radio pretty easily. And you download the app on your phone, the phone controls the radio. You can get online. You can look at the meshtastic discord and there are sub channels that have been made for all different regions in the United States so you can get in touch with folks that are there. Some cities that have more developed systems have moved off default settings. So if you're trying to access the infrastructure that folks have already built, which might be useful for you, you can find out about it through that.

Yeah, definitely. Like San Diego has a very developed meshtastic community and like a big network, which is great. It means I can message my friends across the city and rely on that network and all the repeaters and know that it'll be like a reliable form of messaging. Might not be the case everywhere. Right. Like if you're in.

Yeah, I'm in New York for example. And it's pretty radio frequency hostile environment. There's huge buildings everywhere in Manhattan, but in the outer boroughs it works a lot better. You get coverage on the street level with just, you know, a dozen repeaters that the community here is set up. Yeah, but yeah, definitely, you know, it won't work in every scenario. There's some fine tuning that needs to be done in settings, but more or less you can get online for 20 or 30 bucks. If you're having trouble connecting to your local network, think about the antenna. Make sure you try and get that antenna high up and that's where people are going to set up like a little tiny solar powered repeater. They can put it on their rooftop or the Closest hill. And that'll give you, you know, with a very subpar installation, you know, 10 block radius around where you've set that up, where you're going to have communication connectivity with the rest of the network. Right?

Yeah, yeah. Seen people put them on their rooftops or like, like you say, like, like on top of a hill and they're pretty small. Like if people are thinking of a repeater, like a, like a ham radio repeater, these guys are much smaller. Right?

Like, yeah, we're talking, you know, some of them, you know, you can look on Etsy and someone's built, you know, a repeater that they're selling that's, that's built out of like a solar powered light and they just took the guts out. Put the radio in and that's the housing for it. It's just like a really blends in with the environment with just like little antennas sticking out the light and the light doesn't work, but.

Right, but it looks like a lawn light. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People think your light's broken, but yeah, I've seen that one. And sometimes people do that because you get the battery and the solar panel and everything when you buy the light. So you just have to do a little switch around and add the radio board. Right?

Yeah, it's all, it's not rocket science. Know the average person, if you've ever soldered anything together, you can, you can definitely do this.

Yeah. What if you like I would say one thing that I've found with Meshtastic is it is a fairly like, like beta tester experience. Right. Like, especially once you go to the standalone devices, like some of those, they're better. The meshtastic software is much better now. Firmware is much better now than it was.

Yeah, I mean, it's under constant development. This is an open source project. Right. So yeah, you know, people were starting to mess around with this stuff back during Occupy Wall street and you know, they'd be able to communicate a couple of blocks and you know, people were like, oh, that's cute. You know, but the folks that were working on the project, they kept working on it, they developed the protocol itself and fine tuned it so that now, you know, it works with very, very weak signals. And the software is under constant development. You know, there's a new firmware update every couple of months and major upgrades, you know, every six months. Ham radio nerds mixed with people that are interested in privacy and security, all working on this together and a huge array of hackers and techies that are making this happen and they really believe in making this available.

Yeah. And I found it to be a really welcoming community. Generally when you set up your meshtastic app, if you're listening and you do you have the like Lora channel, which everyone in an area can, can talk on and then you can make your private channels as you wish for your group, so your friends, your family, whatever you want. And that. Is that the case? I think that's the case by default. Right.

Well, like I was saying, some, some cities have now been moving away from the default settings because just by the nature of how the mesh networks currently configured, if someone has like bad settings, incorrect settings, or just spamming the network accidentally, they caused a lot of issues for the whole network because it's an open network.

Okay.

So folks are moving off the default settings in a lot of different cities now. But yeah, I mean you can also set up your own private network. There's like 120something frequency slots that people can use different modulations. So you can build your own network for your community or you can join the one that's already active in your area.

Yeah. And like I found that at least the San Diego one is very welcoming. I can ask if I need help with something or. We had a San Diego rainstorm a few months ago and a bunch of people's roof nodes just got wasted by the rain because no one in San Diego thinks it's ever going to rain. And then when it does, everything falls apart. So folks are very helpful in sharing some tips for making stuff that would stand up to living anywhere else.

I've learned a lot from this community, but people are always experimenting and learning and developing the systems better. But it's definitely something to think about because a lot of folks are building this network both for a situation of privacy when you, you don't want to use cell phone towers or when cell phones go down and the electric, it goes down like in New York, it's going to, it happens every, you know, decade or so.

Yeah, San Diego too, we have a blackout every now and again.

So, you know, building a resilient network means thinking about the worst case scenario. They had a pretty established meshtastic network in North Carolina and then the hurricane hit and about half their nodes went down and all of a sudden the network wasn't working anymore because people hadn't really hardened up the, you know, with the excitement of, of just being able to produce these, these nodes very cheaply and the fun of just throwing them up everywhere. People weren't focused on, you Know, building them for 150 mile an hour winds. You know, if you just have your node zip tied to a chain link fence, you know, maybe that's not going to survive when you really need it to, to be there. So it's something to think about. But that's not to think that you got to do everything perfect to, to get going. You know, you can totally just get a cheapo radio and start having fun and experimenting.

Yeah. And then. Yeah, over time you can, you can harden your stuff and get more expert if people like, if they're not, you know, they don't want to 3D print a case and solder a board to something else. Like what are some products, like some radio places where they could just buy a like plug and play?

Yeah, there's so many. There's a nice one made by Seed Studio that is waterproof, dust proof in the size of like your bank card and just sits in your pocket. The battery lasts a day or two. It's called the card tracker or something like that. Yeah, it gets a T1, T1000E. There we go.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's like named after the Terminator.

I hope not. It's not what we're trying to build. Yeah, but you know, Heltechs are super inexpensive. You can get one with a case and you need an external battery for those. If you just do a quick search. You know, there's like a dozen companies producing radios like this that are pretty much ready to go.

Yeah. And you can, you can decide the form factor and the battery life and obviously like the bigger the generally. Right. Like getting the T1000. It's a pretty small antenna.

Yeah, the antenna is very good for receiving, but it's not a great transmit antenna. It's inside that tiny little card sized enclosure. So obviously that's not the right thing if you're trying to get out. But if you're, if you have a node that's on your rooftop that you built a little enclosure for you just like that one on Etsy, something simple like that that you could leave outside your tiny card tracker T1000 is going to be able to transmit to your rooftop, no problem. And that's going to get out to the rest of the network.

Yeah. And I've seen people do the same thing on top of their car or their truck. They'll put a little repeater up there or a little node up there and then they can get out to the world that way. What are some of that, like you can do some Pretty interesting, I guess. Plugins or applications with mesh, beyond sending encrypted text messages to someone you can.

Plug in packet, you can send your GPS coordinates, lots of people have little weather sensors just because they're, you know, interest in that kind of stuff. But there are other folks, like incorporating different devices that folks would want to be able to have access to that data from anywhere in the areas. So like. Yeah, yeah. Like for example, the Electronic Freedom foundation, they. They're producing a stingray sniffer that police use when they're trying to ray hunter. It's called scan for or. Well, the stingrays are the, the fake cell phone towers that police departments use to capture metadata. And so, you know, you could have one of those connected to a mesh tastic node. And so if a stingray is deployed, that can, you know, you can send out an alert to your area that stingray is active at that moment. And people, People can turn their cell phones on.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good application. Actually, there's someone in San Diego who has a possum trap which catches. Doesn't hurt the possum. It just catches them and then for some reason they notify the entire San Diego network when the possum trap has been sprung, and then it links to a webcam of the possum trap.

Yeah, well, maybe that's like better. Better applied to like a private channel.

Yeah, yeah. You got like 500 people being like.

There'S a possum in the trap.

Yeah. And of course the person was responding to the possum, so didn't like notify like everyone else what was going on. Like suddenly there's just a link to a video of a possum. I think the possum's fine. I think the person just relocated the possum, but.

Well, now everyone can watch. Sure. He's handling the possum correctly, right?

Yeah, yeah. He's accountable, I guess, to the whole meshtastic community.

Was in there for three hours. We all know.

Just like, yeah, shame on you. I guess. One thing, talking of people coming to get you for your possible treatment or other things, one thing people should be aware of is when you enable, if. If you buy a device. Right. And it has a GPS chip plugged in, there are various settings in that regard that you can have. Right. Regarding to whom it's broadcasting, your location and how accurately it's broadcast.

That's right. So there are different settings for each channel that you have in the app. So with the open channel that everyone in your geographic area is on. Perhaps you don't want to share your location, but maybe with the group that you're hiking with or going to a protest with, you want to share your location. Right. So you can change your ability to share the location depending on the group, and you can also change the accuracy of the location. And there are interesting things that people do with that. Like if, if they're with a group of folks and you're hiking, for example, you can all be sharing your GPS location with one another and you can also drop pins that are shared. Right. So if you have a place that you're trying to hike to and a place that you've set up camp, you can drop those pins. Or if there's a place that a protest is going and you want to share that location with everyone, you drop a pin.

Yeah. Without. And it doesn't go across your phone. Like, it doesn't go, it doesn't go across your phone network, I should say it may go across your phone if you're Bluetooth to your phone. So it offers you some privacy. Let's say I want to include someone in my mesh group who is not within meshtastic range of me. Right. Like, I can't get a, I can't repeat off enough meshtastic nostrils nodes to, to get it. To get a message to them.

You can through the Internet or you can also tunnel through a private network. Yep. It's called mqtt. And setting that up is a little more complicated, but it's, you know, there's lots of, of good readmes available on the Internet to explain how to set that up.

Yeah. I found everything I've wanted to do with a meshtastic. There's a video.

There's probably 10 videos.

Yeah, yeah. Or I ask you. But yeah, you can. Like for instance, it's also very popular for people to leave their meshtastic radio on while they're flying. I'm not sure if that's like strictly like legal or not, but you'll often see people like, posting about all the nodes they picked up as they were flying across the United States.

Yeah, people do interesting things like that. Or put it in a weather balloon and send it up. People have been able to set records, you know, transmitting hundreds of miles if you get high enough. Right. So that's, that's one thing to think about. I've mentioned a couple times.

Yeah.

If you're having trouble connecting, get an antenna up higher.

Yeah. I've seen a guy who has a kite and the kite just goes up with.

Yeah. People stick a node in a drone and you can even connect it directly to the power supply of the drone, send it up and fly. And that's good for like a communications window. If you want, you know, every 30 minutes to communicate with folks, you send the drone up every 30 minutes or the top of the hour or. Right. And then you can communicate over a very wide area.

Right, yeah, that makes sense. It's.

Or if someone gets lost in the woods, you know, you can, you can send that, Send up the drone and get over that mountaintop that's blocking the signal.

That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Or like you could have. Yeah, that could be a way to get your message out. And like, I know I've heard of people using it, I guess not really as an alternative to something like a Garmin inreach, but as a sort of rescue beacon where they have, like, they have a network among hikers and then at the end of the network there's something that's connected to the Internet so that they can get their, like, rescue me message out. And of course it can also update their location. And so someone who is coming to help them could come and help them that way.

Yeah, there's countless, countless ways to implement the system. And I find it interesting.

Yeah, it's cool. And I think another thing I would add, I suppose is if, you know, the people in your community might be averse to this or that. It's not very tech inclined. Maybe it's financially and practically not very challenging to buy half a dozen mesh radios, give them to people, and with five minutes on their phone, you can set it up and. And then if you need it, it's there. Or like, I know people who do it for music festivals. They buy a bunch of them and like, hey, everyone take one of these. Let me download this app on your phone. I can see where you are if you get lost.

Yeah, you can see where they are. And when the cell phones are, the tower is clogged up, you can still communicate.

Yeah, I think it has that, like for natural disasters or times when the cell network isn't working, like, it's a really.

Yeah, you know, I gave one to my parents, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like for people who have, you know, kids who are able to go about and do stuff on their own, but still they want to like, be in contact with them or, you know, their kids are going for a hike or something, it's a great way to have a, have a little means of keeping in touch with each other. Or like, yeah, if you're in a hurricane situation, it's a great way to be able to communicate without relying on cell towers, which tend to not work so well in those scenarios. So I guess to wrap up. I know you're part of Signals Rising. If people wanted to find out more about meshing, if they were interested in other forms of radio, like, where. Where would they be able to find Signals Rising? Find some more information about that.

Yeah, we're. Our website is signalsrising.org we don't have a terrible amount of information there, but we do have our email, which is signals rising, protonmail.com and you can reach out to us if you have questions. We have a little discord where we share resources and we also help. We're focused on helping community groups with communication systems, whether that's trainings or hardware, and, you know, the disenfranchised communities that just need a little bit of help, you know, so reach out to us if you'd like, and we're available to speak with and do remote trainings or anything like that.

Yeah, perfect. Brooke, you're a mesh novice. Have we. Sorry to put you on the spot. Have we addressed questions? You have. Do you feel sufficiently informed on meshing?

Yes, I think I'm ready to get going.

All right. Okay, perfect. Good. That's what we like to hear.

I'm just here for the possums.

Within, like two weeks. Trapping possums everywhere. That's what we can call the episode Possum Update or SEO. Really? Well, yeah. Well, Chia, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing all your knowledge on meshtastic. That was great.

No, it's been my pleasure. Thank you both very much and keep it up.

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