AI6YR BenSomeone using #meshtastic on a plane.
Muro deGrizecoWhat is your Meshtastic device?
@murodegrizeco Bought a $25 HELTEC V3 just to see what this whole thing is all about, LOL. Not sure it does anything different from APRS, except it's non-ham bands and possibly smaller.
Chris Wolff 
Wait, so… if I get an amateur radio license, it opens up more mesh networks that are (legally) unavailable otherwise?
Zimmie@Christian_Freiherr_von_Wolff @ai6yr @murodegrizeco Well, an amateur radio license … and some relatively exotic hardware such as a Mobilinkd TNC:
There are software implementations if you want to throw a computer at the problem. These handle only the data modulation and need a separate radio. There are lots of cheap radios out of China (look for Baofeng, Anytone, and Radioddity). The extremely cheap ones are relatively low-quality, but cheap enough you don’t feel too bad about outgrowing them.
There are also plenty of radio which support APRS internally, though they tend to cost >$200.
@Christian_Freiherr_von_Wolff @ai6yr @murodegrizeco There are also several digital radio standards such as C4FM (Yaesu), D-STAR (Icom, Kenwood), and DMR (mostly the Chinese vendors). Of these, C4FM is the easiest to get started, and DMR is the most complicated.
All of these support connecting repeaters over the Internet to a system which acts a lot like an IRC server. It’s not peer-to-peer like Meshtastic, but it allows people to talk over great distances.
There are “hotspots” which are basically low-power radios run by a computer which can join these IRC-like servers. You talk via a normal transceiver to the hotspot, which sends the signal over the Internet. Received traffic is then played out the hotspot for you to hear on the transceiver.
@bob_zim @ai6yr @murodegrizeco
Thanks. Bookmarking all of this. I might just start studying for the test (for an amateur radio license), actually. I've always found the idea fascinating.
@Christian_Freiherr_von_Wolff @ai6yr It’s pretty easy to brute-force your way through the Technician (lowest level license) test in the US. The test itself is a series of multiple-choice questions drawn from a pool which is published along with the answers to each. The position of the answers can change (i.e, you can’t just memorize “A”), but the wording can’t.
I’m not sure how other countries handle the license tests.
@bob_zim @Christian_Freiherr_von_Wolff Yeah, I suggest loading Hamstudy.org and passing the Tech level exam as if you were playing a trivia game, and then find some hams to help you through actually getting on the air. It makes a LOT more sense once you are able to get on the air than trying to learn all the details of the material first.