Any meshtastic / meshcore users in Winnipeg?
1mon 13d ago by lemmy.ca/u/a_gee_dizzle in winnipeg@lemmy.ca
Title. I know that this is a pretty niche question, but I figure there is probably a lot of overlap with people who are into the fediverse and people who are into mesh radio networks.
I recently got a couple of nodes that I'm playing with occasionally.
Driving around I found some other nodes visible in St Boniface and downtown (Exchange area) that didn't appear on the online maps.
Never saw any traffic on long-fast. Tried broadcasting a few tests but didn't get any replies.
That’s cool. It’s good to hear there are some hidden nodes too.
Never saw any traffic on long-fast. Tried broadcasting a few tests but didn’t get any replies.
Have you managed to connect to anyone on the local network or is it mostly dead?
Haven't seen a single message, nor got a reply.
That said, I have only spent a couple of days messing with it so far.
It's possible that there is a community on a channel other than the default long-fast. But I haven't experimented with that yet either.
From my house (south perimeter area) I have only seen one other node. I have to do closer to downtown to see many more and that's still on the to-do list.
That's surprising to me, because there is a local telegram group for meshtastic users in Manitoba and it seems to be reasonably active. Maybe you should pop in and ask them what's up. Here's the link if you're interested: https://t.me/MeshtManitoba
I'm aware that there is a telegram group, but I prefer not to use that platform.
That’s fair enough
6 in Winnipeg , greatings from Belgium
Greetings!
As soon as I saw there were 5+ Lemmy Winnipeggers, I strongly suspected that at least one of them (us?) was operating meshtastic nodes. I had looked at Meshtastic a few years ago for giggles and saw the node map had a couple in Winnipeg... almost certainly they're among us :eyes:
I had looked at Meshtastic a few years ago for giggles and saw the node map had a couple in Winnipeg
Did you ever buy any hardware or were you just perusing?
Perusing/learning, I didn't get far enough to actually getting hardware. Still might in the future because I like the concept, but I distracted myself by running a Matrix server instead.
If you're interested in that sort of thing but don't want to bother with the hardware then you should check out the reticulum network. It's pretty neat. It's basically like meshtastic, only it doesn't just use LoRa frequencies. It can use LoRa frequencies, but it can also use other radio frequencies, or Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or whatever really. So you can just access it using your Wi-Fi, no hardware needed right away. But because it can work with whatever medium you like can create a mesh network at a global scale, rather than just connecting with people in your area. I think the long term goal is to create a new, second internet that is more private and more resilient to disaster scenarios or state censorship. It's pretty neat.
You can use it to browse pages on the 'NomadNet' which is basically like what the internet was like in the late 80s. You can browse through your terminal, though there is a graphical interface for it called MeshChatX, though I've never really used it (the terminal works fine imo, but it's not everyone's cup of tea). There's a community for it here on Lemmy, though it's not very active. Reticulum@mander.xyz
Interesting. I'll reply in more depth later, but I just read a lot of their docs. Have you played with it at all?
Yeah, I’ve been playing around with it a bit lately. I haven’t really read much of the docs I just dove in and I’m learning as I go. I haven’t really got a handle on DMing people on it yet but I’ve been browsing the nomad net and talking to people on the forums there and its been pretty interesting. I like to just announce my presence then see all the pages that pop up. A lot of them have low uptime in our area so you’ll be unable to connect, and a lot of them are nothing special, but there are a lot of gems. It’s hard to distinguish the good sites from the bad sites on the outset, you just got to visit a bunch of random pages and save the ones you like. At least that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m sure there’s a more efficient way (I think someone out there created a reticulum search engine?) but this trail-and-error system has been working fine for me so far
Toying with getting started.
That's basically where I'm at too. Honestly the biggest hurdle for me right now is I don't know where to buy the hardware in Canada