Did MESHTASTIC Die At Hamvention??

kill is kind of a clickbaity word here I appreciate but it it is nuanced and I I need to explain so recently at ham in 2024 there were over a hundred of these little nodes these mesh tastic nodes and if you've been following my channel for long enough you've seen me do some deep Dives on how to build them how to set them up how to use them it's grown Leaps and Bounds on the videos I've made and I've tried to keep up with some of the things they they've done even interviewing a couple of the developers I'll post a link in the video description it was a really good talk but what we found was there was so many of these nodes meshing right cuz what do these do right they occasionally transmit hey I'm here hey I'm here let's be friends and then they can send information their packets packets is just a useful term I'm using here it's probably not the right term but they'll transmit their little pieces of information across this mesh that they build out every time a new one of these pops up they either build these people in or they take nodes out as they stop responding or stop beaconing well when you have that many nodes in one location it gets to the point where the entire time or what we call link budget capability of how many beacons you could put into a second a minute or whatever was almost entirely saturated by these little devices saying I'm here so am I hey I'm over here too let's be friends what it caused to happen was when we would try and send a message the human beings actually trying to use the mesh Network we weren't able to get our Transmissions out we were getting messages that said maximum transmission reach or retransmission reach which means the mesh device tried to send our message multiple times to get it out onto that time link Budgy thing and it wasn't able to do it now this isn't a failure of mesh tastic that's the first thing this isn't a bug that we uncovered this isn't a problem with mesh tastic let me get that right out of the way there's nothing mesh tastic is doing wrong and I actually reached out to the developers to confirm hey what do we do in the future to handle this and of course I want to be really clear mesh tastic is used in much greater numbers at places like Defcon Coachella The Burning Man you know those big events these huge events and also in urban environments so the tips I'm going to talk about today are going to be about mesh tastic use in urban environments or a very Dench mesh Network there are two fundamental tips that the developers recommended and there's a third that was recommended by the user community on how best to prevent this overloading saturation and not being able to use your messaging capability the first is you must have mqtt turned off if you're going to be using just the standard Channel system if you've got a 100 nodes and they're all on the same channel you got to have make sure that mqtt is turned off what is mqtt well it is basically where one of these guys will have a connection to the internet via Wi-Fi or you know whatever and it will try to bring in other nodes from the internet that are also mqtt enabled say in another part of the country or another part of the world into the node dense node Network that you are currently operating in we had a couple of these at Hamvention and they worked great the first day it was really cool we were actually seeing nodes pop up in Texas and New York and all over the place where people had used my QR code remember that I made before Hamvention and they were able to join our Network which was fun we were able to you know chat with people that was the day before Hamvention kicked off and at that time it was pretty novel and fun when Hamvention started on Friday the mqtt stations being somewhat aided by the internet were getting pulled in and it was causing all kinds of slow down because now we've got even more congestion and whatever the effect of trying to bounce all this stuff across the internet was causing through one little poor node or multiple nodes are like help help I can't handle all this have mqtt turned off that's the the first thing and if you you're like I don't even know what mqtt is it's fine it's actually not something that I'm not really I'm not really an advocate of that anyway with mesh tastic I'd prefer this mesh to just be mesh tastic and not use the internet in any way it's novel for those that need it but just skip it so the second thing and this one is probably going to be the most important when you spool up your first mesh tastic device it's going to have a primary Channel Channel Zero it's going to be long fast so I I just did a a big deep dive because I I I use the word uh packet and that's not correct the term that Laura uses is called a chirp and that is a uh it it's basically a pre-formulated message that's controlled by time and it's almost identical to satellite communication which I thought was really cool so it's broken up into sections there's a preamble bit there's a sync section or a sync symbol there's a payload and the payload could be like hey I'm Josh's metastic I'm right here and this is my Telemetry information or my GPS information and there's a CRC and CRC is just like a number value that if you took that whole message and did a algorithm against it those numbers should match got it it it doesn't really matter if you got it or not but there's this spreading Factor right so we've been talking short medium long or long fast dot dot dot dot dot right so the spreading factor is how long it takes for that chirp to go out so if we are on long fast mesh tastic is basically saying hello I am Josh's mesh tastic I can be found at this this location but if you're using short it's more equivalent to like the Micro Machines guy back in the uh the ' 80s and 990s like hello I'm Josh mtic I can be found right here here's my Telemetry it's it it reduces the time it takes to transmit the same amount of information this is important because it allows you better use of what we called link budget or that time in which any one of these nodes could be transmitting right so if you are in a highly contested mesh network setup with lots of these different nodes you dear viewer you might not want to use long fast you might not want to stick to that default primary zero channel in fact the devs at mesh tastic told me we should play around with medium and fast make your channel your primary Channel a a short fast and then have a backup uh redundant channel channel one channel two Etc you can play around with it at that point so yeah that's that's kind of the tips here we didn't necessarily break mesh tastic but we definitely uh bumped our head against the ceiling of that long spreading factor which I just learned a lot about and if you'd like to learn more about it a fantastic video that I found link will be in the description from Richard Varner I uh I didn't I didn't expect it would to line up right with what I do as far as an engineer but boy it got there real quick and I was like oh you dummy and so that was was that was kind of fun I find more interesting things about mesh tastic every time I I play around with these but yeah that that was uh that was a cool one anyway if you found this video helpful and and you live in an urban contested environment and you're like oh my God I don't know these things don't work right maybe play around with some of your channels and you'll probably do a little bit better give that a shot I'm Josh k6 naaz thanks so much for watching and I'll talk to you later 73

Channel: Ham Radio Crash Course

Views: 27,638

Keywords: ham radio, Ham radio crash course, how to get your technician license, what to do with ham radio, having fun with ham radio, how to run a ham radio net, hoshnasi, introduction to ham radio, ham radio basics, amateur radio, amateur radio antenna, ham radio antenna, operating HF, qrp antenna, hf radio antenna, calling cq on hf, ham radio review, amateur radio review, lora meshtastic, lora mesh network, lora meshtastic set up

Id: i4k0AUnMvwo

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024