Compare and contrast how meshcore and meshtasic handle GPS data.

with meshtastic you can setup your GPS to beacon on an encrypted chat that only you and your family have. No one else can see your position and you can program it to transmit at some interval like 10minutes. I'm not sure there are any smarts here so it'll just send a position packet every 10 minutes forever. Imagine a guy leaving his car in the driveway all night transmitting.

meshcore doesn't like to clutter the radio with automatic transmissions, so anyone who wants to know your position will have to request a positon from you. You can control who gets to see your position. This method means that your location is only sent when someone wants to see it. Saves a lot of radio airtime.

A note about mesh core's philosophy. Although it is nice to see a map full of repeaters, MC prefers you program your repeater to advertise itself thru the network between 12 and 47 hours. Your repeater can advertise itself directly to users in a given area every 1hour to 12 hours.

The point is we don't want to tie up the network with a lot of repeater advertisements. ADVERTS are the longest packets because they include GPS location of the public encryption key of the repeater.

Since the radio is a finite resource, MC would rather not have the radio filled with GPS plots of lots of repeaters, but rather have a clear channel for when you want to send a message to someone.

I'm breaking this down into small chunks....

For meshcore to route a message it does not actually need to know the GPS location of nearby or distant repeaters.

When you send a message, each repeater along the way tags your message with a (fairly) unique fingerprint. By the time a message ping pongs thru the network, there may be 5 or 6 versions of that packet with a different set of "fingerprints". The first packet that ping pongs by chance to the person you are messaging will be used to determine the path back.

Upon receiving a message from you, the distant station will simply reverse the order of the repeater "fingerprints" and use that to construct a reply message along a very specific list of repeaters.

This is another way MC saves radio air time. Once the path between to stations is known, any communications between those two stations exists only in a line between them. This leaves the rest of the network available for other people to message each other.

If our messages ever fail to make it, we will once again try to send a message without a specified path that will ping pong all over until it finds the other station again.

So.... knowing the position of a repeater on a map is NOT necessary but it is neat to see a map full of stations.

worked more on my friend's shipping container today. I didn't get a picture at end of day. By end of day we had plywood walls on the cieling and one wall.

He bought a buch of 4x8 x 3" poly iso foam sheets years ago and we're finally getting to use them. Note the walls are 3-1/2" thick and the poly iso is 3". He placed 1/2" alumimum backed foam against the metal walls as a thermal break.

Tomorrow we will finish plywood on the right hand wall and lay poly iso foam down on the floor. I ripped a handful of 2x4s today down to 3" to support the plywood floor at the seams.

He's still got to close off the wall at the far end. The last 8ft of the shipping container will become a bathroom next year, but winter is coming here and we're just trying to get him squared away for when it gets cold a month from now.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UkEEybifIAE

Another Australian preserving jar comparison

Got floor insulated in the shipping container today. This foam is rigid enough to be a floor but there are variations in thickness between panels. I ripped the 2 by’s you see to be 3-1/8”. We screwed them to the floor and screwed plywood onto them. We also shot expanding foam around the foam blocks as we were placing the plywood.

yesterday, one of our local guys drove to the bottom of a meshtastic tower and was able to use bluetooth from his phone to update the firmware and convert it to meshcore without climbing the 300ft tower. That's the C50D repeater in the bottom center. It's pink because it's new and the other one that was converted yesterday is just north of it.

The network is growing.

For reference this screenshot is 100miles 160km wide

You all may recall a few weeks ago I put a repeater on a grain elevator at 130ft (60m). It is hearing about 10miles 16km around with one outlier at 42km. Bear in mind these sample pings are transmitted from inside a car moving at 60mph or 80mph on interstate 20 at 4ft tall. There's a lot of flutter. Stationary repeater to repeater traffic goes much further.

All of this is done with 160mW solar powered radios.

A couple of textbook examples.

There are also (flowing) artesian wells where once you drill into the formation, the head is enough to free flow.
Those aren’t common and likely quite rare where one would have enough head to omit using a pump.

What would you do if your cell phone and internet stopped working during an emergency? How would you get updates or keep in touch with family?

I thought this might be worth sharing. It's called “Emergency Communication Equipment Inventory: Could You Stay Connected During a 14-Day Emergency?” and covers different emergency communication options and how to find out if your backup methods would actually work when you need them.

There's a free printable Emergency Communication Equipment Checklist included, along with links to other free preparedness guides and printable checklists covering food, water, first aid, backup power, and more.

Hope you find this useful!

https://preppingcommunities.com/emergency-communication-equipment-inventory/