[DisasterRadio] Disaster Radio, Ripple, Meshtastic, Project Owl.

[Greg Hall]

Mitra,

Good to hear from a (nearly) local. I'm on the MidNorth Coast, NSW, 
Australia, only a day's drive South from you.

Since the fires of Summer 2019, when our community, and many others, 
were cut off by the failure of the civilian comms, I have been 
researching these LoRa systems for resilient comms.

The first that caught my eye was Scott Powell's well-developed Ripple 
ecosystem https://www.instructables.com/member/sqij/ I've assembled a 
few versions of those and they work well. Drawback with Ripple is that 
it is not open source, and the 'Commander' app is payware (one per 
network). Also Scott is the only developer. That said, he does seem to 
be committed to it - I guess the payware $ help keep him focused ;)

Then I assembled a few Disaster.Radio and they too worked well. It was a 
quite active OS project, but pandemic seems to have distracted the devs 
(understandable!) Good to see energy coming back in to it.

Meshtastic was my next, and that's very active, with a number of devs 
and wide range of options. https://meshtastic.org/

I've assembled a number of these little gadgets, they all work as 
advertised, and no need for a geek, if they are properly powered, 
enclosed and solidly mounted. Provision for external controls, esp. 
reset is still needed though, as the tiny buttons are not easily 
reached. There are some quite remote deployments being mentioned, at 
least one repeater perched on a Scottish mountain over winter!

My mainstay to date has been the LilyGo T-Beam, recently added a T-Echo, 
and there are a couple of WisBlock RAK4600 sets in the mail. Others have 
been the  Heltec and several earlier LilyGo boards.

https://www.project-owl.com/ducklink looks very promising. I've begun 
exploring that with a couple of T-Beams for the job.

I agree with CodeBus, order a few T-Beams to get your feet wet, join the 
lists and watch a few Git repos. You can reflash them to other projexts 
to taste them

D.R, Meshtastic and Project Owl have the means to connect to other 
messaging services.

BTW: There's a Meshtastic plugin for https://www.civtak.org/ Every 
community fire-ute needs one - Not to mention the Rural Fire Service trucks!

Greg Hall
0265504481
0428850144
VK2GTH
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