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.
Where I live, we’ve got a set of different community resilience groups, where one of them is CERT (which I’m not part of) and the other one is ARES/RACES (which I joined lately). And I already got a lecture from one of the ARES/RACES guys who is also in CERT that I ought to also join CERT. And, at least for us, both CERT and ARES/RACES come with a badge and background check.
ARES/RACES is, honestly, the biggest slam-dunk? Because part of the problem, at least looking at the experience of things here is that at least some of this needs to be organized ahead of time with identified people who have been background checked. And part of this is that you can generally go all-city with a reasonably priced VHF/UHF handheld, maybe with an antenna tower, worst case with a 50W base station radio.
Except that you need a ham license and you can’t just have a set of radios at the caches for people to use. There’s some arguments I guess about if the FCC ruling is meant to say that amateurs can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency or randos can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency but presumably the FCC has better things to do. But either way, you kinda need to know a bunch of stuff to use them effectively.
Which isn’t entirely a bad thing? Because there’s a world of difference between someone who can use a radio and someone who can send a message properly and quickly with the hard words turned into phonetics, etc.
Meshtastic has a lot of desirable properties for EmCom. It’s not there yet? I’d like to see it get there.
The big thing is that some solar powered Meshtastic nodes and some other random battery powered nodes have a lot of the positive attributes of a VHF/UHF handheld in that you are going all-city without using up nearly the sort of power that would be required to keep cell phones up to go all-city.
A meshtastic “repeater” is a lot simpler than a UHF/VHF repeater.
But there’s problems.
For example, there was a guy who got himself a big fine lately because he was getting on the channels that the firefighters were using and trying to convince them to save some of his land as if he was a fire department worker. Running it in amateur mode with amateur power might be nice, but amateur mode means no encryption.
I lost power on Wednesday and I couldn’t really get good cell service. Because everybody just grabs their phone for entertainment. The problem is that you want Meshtastic to have fun uses outside of merely EmCom so people use it and it doesn’t just sit there as an abstract concept, but you also don’t want it to go down because everybody’s bored.
In a comms-down situation, you cannot hand someone a LoRa board with meshtastic on it and let them use it to augment their phone because if there’s no cell service, there’s no way to get the app.
One fairly concrete problem that hits me is that in ARES/RACES we do packet radio. Part of the thing is that if they do activate CERT and ARES/RACES in an emergency, there’s a lot of paperwork to attend to, and it’s required because afterwards the insurance companies gotta do their stuff and the city needs to declare how much the disaster cost and everything. Obviously paper sucks and is bulky so the emergency center has packet radio in case the internet is down to send messages. To me it feels like there’s a very Meshtastic-friendly application for that specific part of the puzzle. And I think part of that is pub-sub and store-and-forward.
tl;dr: dono. VHF/UHF radios with FM-encoded audio still wins on the “will always work” whereas meshes can fail to work because they are too thin or too oversubscribed. But Meshtastic has a bunch of positive attributes that make it a worthy tool for emcom, with a bit of work.
Thanks for the tip, will also look into ARES.
I’ve only taken one of the CERT classes. Will have another next week and am signed up for three more. My understanding is that CERT is targeted at civilians who form a neighborhood first response team in case official services are inaccessible or stretched thin.
The material leans heavily toward self-help (medical triage, food/water/medicine caches, etc) until help arrives. My thinking was the official channels already have access to UHF/VHF for their own comms. But CERT trainers kept repeating that if a big disaster hits, neighborhood groups should plan to make do for 10 days (and maybe up to 30) before outside help can come in.
Assuming 10 days without power, gas, or water and maybe closed roads, seemed like Meshtastic might be a good way to coordinate inside these neighborhood groups and across them.
The LilyGo T-Deck (https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck?variant=44907372413109) with a 3D printed or IP-66/67 enclosure seems like an inexpensive civilian-friendly device to offer CERT groups without requiring a radio license. But the repeater network needs to be there and configured for redundancy. TBH, I don’t know if it’s a good solution, but I’m going to ask the instructors this week if there are any alternatives already in place. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn as much as I can (hence the post).
You might also see if there’s a way to contact the Monticello Florida Community Emergency Response Team.
That’s actually a great clip to show the CERT training folks here. Will share it with them this coming week at the class. Thanks!
I just saw it yesterday and was like, oh, that’s cool. And then today you’re asking about it.
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.