TELL ME

  • copymyjalopy
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    10 months ago

    Meshtastic long range radio systems. Off grid, user created, low bit rate but stupid long range.

    • SomeAmateur
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      10 months ago

      Sweet I’m pretty inexperienced with radio stuff but I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while. Time to hop down the rabbit hole!

      • copymyjalopy
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        10 months ago

        It’s just the right amount of DIY to be engaging and so cheap to get into. Plus the discord community is really active.

      • ditty@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        This is the first time I’ve heard about this; seems so cool! Any ideas which radios I should be looking at?

        • root@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Get on the notification list for a RAK starter kit. I have heltec and RAK, and the NRF chip outperforms the ESP32 based ones by leaps. Barely uses any battery. Just check which frequency you need for your country. I’m in NA so we use 915 MHz

          Link

      • copymyjalopy
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        10 months ago

        This is LoRa but there’s heavy crossover with the HAM community.

        • beastlykings
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          10 months ago

          Cool. I got licensed just before the pandemic, I’ve played with APRS a bit but never LoRa

    • Higante@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I placed my order for some radios to play with 3 days ago. Im unreasonably excited for them to arrive.

      • copymyjalopy
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        10 months ago

        I’m in thr US and had to order mine from Aliexpress. Those were some long weeks of waiting.

        • Higante@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          It doesn’t help that i orderd it on the 2nd day of Chinese new year, so i wont see any action for at least a week.

    • Arthur_Leywin@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      How did you learn to not fuck up? I heard if you interfere with important radio frequencies (airplanes I think) you’ll get punished by the law.

      Edit: I looked into transceivers at one point and saw that mentioned.

      • copymyjalopy
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        10 months ago

        They operate in bands intended for stuff like LoRa and IoT. So there’s no danger of messing with other systems.

      • copymyjalopy
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        10 months ago

        I’m not much of an expert but it’s basically low power UHF radios that use a particular waveform and FFT process to decode signals that are well below background noise. My radio regularly picks up messages with an SNR -10. I like it to the GPS system’s algorithms.

        The main drawback is that, because they’re low power, you have to have LOS between antennas.

    • JohnDClay
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      10 months ago

      Like ham radio bounce off the ionosphere over the horizon long range?

      • copymyjalopy
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        10 months ago

        Not that far. Most LoRa systems use UHF bands so you need LoS to get these super low powered radios to work.

    • root@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Lmaoooo, was going to say the same thing. Fantastic project that has me hooked.