The scenario that GregT identifies also applies in our village, doubtless also many others.
My intention is to have LibreMesh routers at the key community centres, each with a modest LiPo and PV panel to keep it alive, and directional antennae on one or two of the WiFi RF connex. A panel or collinear, homebrew or commercial for local, Yagi or recycled PayTV dish with bow-tie on 2.4GHz for point2point links - or just buy Ubiquiti stuff...
The LibreMesh will be for the use of general community members, and should provide cached pages of important services; news, weather, fire, health, and a view of messages and incidents reported by our community 'first responders', and also messaging services for general use. Probably limited external comms, need to conserve bandwidth. We may make available audio feeds of emergency services mobile radio and our own 2-way network. The D.R/Meshtastic/ProjectOwl devices, etc are more for these first responders already equipped and familiar with their function. If we can get CivTAK happening on both, there will be a map of incidents available.
Given the turgidity of the authorities, I expect zero integration
with official emergency services, but we can make available a few
useful feeds.
Assistance in defining all of this more than welcome.
(& Yes, this is a D.R list, but finding the role of D.R in
the wider community is, in my view, key to implementing it.
Greg Hall 0265504481 0428850144 VK2GTH -
Greg Hall <greghall@brushbox.info> writes: Lots of interesting thoughts and data points. Will comment only on one:5) All of the systems I've played with allow WiFi connex, but it really is intended that each user has a LORA device, and then the BT personal area network makes sense. It's the LORA device that has the identity on the mesh, not the connected user(s).I think this is going to be a big deal in community deployments. One model is a bunch of people who all have disaster.radio (or whatever) nodes that want to communicate with each other, and the other is also extending some limited comms to the public (at a community center). So architecturally keeping the concept of "user" that can access a node, maybe a different one later, and "node", that speaks the over-lora routing protocol, separate seems useful but also very difficult. Not really in response to your message but in general: When I talked about scalability, I didn't mean the ability to procure and set up N nodes. I meant: once you have N nodes, does the protocol work, or does control traffic overwhelm capacity, and do loss rates and hop counts lead to messages not getting through. Going from 3 to 10 to 30 to 100 is usually a big deal in ad hoc radio systems. We haven't talked about mobility. Generally, if nodes are known not to move routing is easier because your update rates can be lower, because you can believe your topology information for a longer period of time.