#makeShitMonday, #meshtastic edition, in which we made #mesh #radio connections... in a #cave!!

@mbroome and I just completed a weeklong vertical cave rescue certification course, complete with a full-day simulated rescue scenario at the end. Standard comms for cave rescue is over wired field phones - but for this one, we had mesh radios all the way down to one of the main caverns that needed vertical rigging for the rescue.

I was Entrance Control (tracks who goes in / out of the cave, relays comms from the cave to Incident Command on the surface) and had my new MeshPocket on their dark mesh, based on [Vangelis]( https://github.com/semper-ad-fundum/vangelis). @mbroome was on comms *in* the cave - and also had my little Muzi R1 mesh radio.

It's definitely not ready to be primary comms - the radios struggle with low-airspace passages and corkscrews - but it's pretty darn close! Need to add some wired bridges like [the Flamingo project](https://github.com/rbreesems/flamingo) - that project has a really [neat video](https://youtu.be/R3LtLcnrpAk) from a test in Tumbling Rock...

Mesh radio is definitely a new paradigm for cave rescue, and I think doing it in parallel with existing field-phone tech will need separate operators. I had a pretty comfy setup with a field phone to the cave in one ear and an FRS radio to Incident Command on the surface in the other - which was fine, they're both auditory processing and push-to-talk so the only challenge was making sure I pushed the right button each time. 😁 Taking notes was additional cognitive load, and adding mesh comms (visual processing / type to talk) pushed it well beyond anything I could have tracked in a real emergency!

Which is great to know in advance, and I really do think that when this tech matures, it will make a solid replacement for the field phones and comms wire that's been used for the past several decades...

@cannibal