Honestly, its a fun side project, but without enough nodes its more of a hobby. If you want to make it usable, its probably better to use internet or higher power devices (like ham). Or buy a metric ton of these and throw them up high.

As long as you have a node in sight, it should be good for at least some communication. My little window node gets 20+ nodes.

Its biggest + in my book is that you don't have to be a ham to make it work. There are better systems if you want more reliable communications. But its a fun side hobby and, in the event of a power outage, a decent little communicator. Although from personal experience, most of the devices piggy back of your existing cell phones and bluetooth. So ironically as long as the cell towers aren't blown to hell, your still fine either way.

The official meshtastic app has a map view that shows all known nodes.

You don't need cell towers. Your phone is just used as an input device for the radio.

There may be some miscommunication. I ment that in order to use a majority of the meshtastic devices, they require the android or ios app + bluetooth. Not all, but a vast majority. And most of those will have access to a cell phone tower that will likely not go down, even in the event your neighborhood power goes off. At least where I am at. The devices have often been alluded to a disaster proof communications device. And an alternative to instant messaging. Its not as reliable as some other tech that is out there, but its a fun hobby!

Hope that makes more sense.

Low power requirements, battery + solar power source... this isn't science fiction anymore.

Sure, but they could at least put that in the title as well so people who are familiar w/ it don't need to click through.

Exactly. I was hyped because I'd like to send and receive SMS w/o a mobile phone. I was hoping someone implemented the protocol so I could integrate it into my desktop, the "no wi-fi or cell service" was merely a bonus.

But no, this is just a way to communicate over a different radio protocol than mobile phone standards.

What kind of data rate can they provide? Can it support audio? Low bit-rate video?

I've seen LoRa when Pine64 announced some related products some years back, but I haven't really gotten into it. If the community is big enough and the bitrate reasonable enough, I might get one to connect my home to my parents home (about 10 miles away, so at the edge of the range) for fun. It would be cool to set up some smart home stuff at both ends that I could host on my own so I can keep an "eye" on my parents stuff when the travel (mostly just door and occupancy sensors, no video).

In theory the protocol can support those formats. With meshtastic it's only designed for text. You can get some really basic emojis though since they are Unicode.

Nice, 0 within 25 kilometers of me lol.

If its simple enough, I could probably abuse it to send binary data by encoding everything in base64 or something, and writing a simple translator for whatever my app is.

But what does the usable bandwidth look like, and what about latency? If I'm going just out of range from direct communication, I assume I'd be going through other peoples' nodes, but is that intelligent enough to route messages through efficiently? Or could I see crazy latency spikes?

You are at the edge of what I know If you find out, let the rest of us know. I only have vague and hand wavy knowledge at this point of lora slow means lots of latency. GL!

Yeah, whenever I tell the kids "WiFi is down" what that really means is "Comcast has killed our link, again."

Remember, that map is volunteer and only shows nodes of a day or less.

For example, I am the only node in my area who voluntarily puts myself on the map, but there are 10 others who do not.

Then what is it?

Gotcha. I read your post wrong.

The phones are one reason I don't think Meshtastic is good for emergency communications. My main Meshtastic devices run off a battery pack that can run them for 2-3 weeks, but I'd also have to keep a phone charged throughout the disaster to use them.

My wife and I each have a radio, as do several of my friends. They're handy for anything where you may not have cell coverage, like camping. We also use them at protests, to avoid the heavy surveillance that's being done on cell networks. Even if the authorities start looking at Meshtastic, everything except the public channel uses PGP end-to-end encryption, and there is no middleman that has access to the unencrypted data.

We have also put up a repeater node. It's on top of a house at the top of the highest ridge near us. Before it went up we rarely saw more than our own nodes. Now we see several dozen, and sometimes a lot more. And the repeater serves the whole community, not just us. The beauty of a mesh is that everyone contributes to everyone else's coverage.

The mesh in our city is growing rapidly right now. Not only are there a lot of people getting their own nodes, there are a surprising number of people putting up repeaters to help spread the coverage. It's amazing to watch our whole neighborhoods suddenly appear as gaps are filled in.

LoRa has been around for a while trying to break through with different devices, some of it does seem useful, but it's a tough sell to invest in something without knowing where the network will go. A carrier model or something else, maybe subsidies, is needed.

would the network be willing to carry my signals?

That is entirely up to the whim of your neighboring nodes to decide