I’ve been taking CERT disaster relief (DR) classes, put on by the city at the local fire department (we live in an area prone to earthquake, flood, and fire). The subject of communications came up and they mentioned walkie talkies in neighborhood caches, but nobody had any idea about models, ranges, etc.
Been casually looking at Meshtastic and keep seeing it mentioned for DR, but haven’t come across any actual guides or implementations. For example, I can set up a router in my house, but there’s no guarantee it will be standing during a fire, or if power will remain during an earthquake.
There are lots of questions (tech, redundancy, battery backups, range, node placement, while on-the-move, temporary setups, gateways to cell and cloud, etc). Was hoping someone had already figured it out so I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. This would be first for my own neighborhood, then expand to city or county-wide services.
I’ve got another CERT class coming up next week and will ask the Fire Department folks for tips/advice as well, but thought I’d ask here about Meshtastic and maybe point them at some resources, if asked.
For research, am making my way through posts on the Meshtastic site and read the Burning Man report. Also checked out Meshmap in my area (only two routers, one on top of a mountain, but possibly on the back side of it).
FWIW, background in tech, have a ton of ESP32s, RPis, and a few LoRa boards sitting around. Was looking at getting the T-Deck, but am going to hold off until I have a proper plan on what to do with it. Also want to document the process so hopefully come up with a reusable plan. Mainly looking for tips where to look next. TIA.
A couple of things to be aware of. First of all, MeshMap is only showing people who wish to be shown, so there’s likely more activity than what MeshMap will show for a given area. The second thing is do not put routers in your home. A router needs to go on a tall tower or on a mountain peak. In my area it’s very flat and the tallest structures are towers so routers should be probably about a hundred foot above ground level. Clients should be between 20 and 90 feet above ground level and client mute should be less than 20 feet above ground level.
Awesome tips, thank you!
The highest peak around here has a communication tower on it. Pretty sure some of it is for municipal services. Will do research on what it will take to stick a router up there, if there isn’t one already.
That would be perfect. And then you could have clients on tall buildings in the area and have client mute devices for handheld use.
We’re in earthquake terrain (a fault line runs through the middle of town). My concern would be what happens in case of a Loma Prieta scale quake. Going to do some research on fault tolerance, redundancy, and avoiding single points of failure.
Have a buddy who works at a FAANG and has been doing a lot of work on DR. He showed me a picture of his stash of prototypes. Turned out all were built on top of Meshtastic. Going to hit him up for tips next week.
If you can get some density, then it doesn’t matter if a couple of nodes go down in an earthquake because they can just be routed around.
Edit: To clarify, the protocol uses something known as the contention window and a node that hears a signal and is extremely weak has a very short contention window while the other nodes that hear that signal stronger have a longer contention window. This way, the farthest possible away node will be the first one to retransmit a packet in order to make it go farther distance. A router cuts in line and retransmits a packet immediately upon hearing it. Which is why routers need to be high up so that they can see a long way.
The comms channel from YouTube also has a project called TC2 BBS which makes a bulletin board system like the ones you used to use in the 1990s and you can run it on a Raspberry Pi in a place with emergency power and people can access messages on it if needed.