The T1000-E is a truly impressively designed piece of kit. I feel like so much I’ve been into when on bleeding edge is janky or too easy to break, these are solid.

That’s very helpful, thankyou! I am still working out the different modes and we’re just leaving everything as client at this point but good to know for when we get busier!

Yes for emergency services radio is probably better, but have had the conversation that those bands get very busy when there is actually an emergency, and unless you’re directly involved in the emergency response it’s better to keep quiet even if you have the devices. To keep everyone else in the loop a mesh would be really helpful and allows for direct comms between people without radio knowledge. I’ve done enough radio stuff at festivals to know it’s a bit daunting for beginners. But these days pretty much everyone, even your grandma, has a cell phone and most understand apps and text messages. So the learning curve is pretty small.

Keen on Reticulum, but my focus atm is Meshtastic because of the ease of use, both Android and iPhone are dead easy to set up in less than 2 minutes and my use case is for more local nodes in most cases that would be with people with minimal technical skills.

That’s great you have a node high up, I would love to do that here but not sure where it might be practical to do. What kind of tower is the 200 feet one?

I’m in the middle of the 400 and 200 meter people, they are in opposite directions. I was thinking the Station G2 would be good on the roof of the highest house to extend the mesh further but if no one else interested then I was going to do it on mine, which isn’t ideal but would have pretty good reach in one direction, but I’m fairly encouraged with the experiments so far. We get bushwalkers and campers & 4wders up in this area all the time so am expecting to see occasional nodes pop up temporarily if Meshtastic really takes off.

Thanks about the suggestion to try Long Slow, I decided to keep on the default of LongFast at least initially, due to potential for visitors to the region with nodes.

It might be small biccies compared to iron ore to China, but the optics are really bad, and when Australia is included in the tariffs, then psychologically we are siding with Everyone Else in this new US vs Democracy fight. Because that’s what the US (tech bros, who are now in charge) are orchestrating: a direct attack on democracy.

So yes, the numbers are small compared to other countries, but the attack is ideological, and real.

I’m sorry for the good ones, but the current actions are a huge threat to democracy worldwide, and while I think the puppet masters expect this response and globalisation is already in the process of collapsing (read The End of the World Is just the Beginning - Mapping the Collapse of Globalisation by Peter Zeihan) we can try and avoid this fate elsewhere. It is NOT inevitable that the tech bros rule us all as serfs, but getting away from Big Tech, means cutting off the US out of our digital lives as much as we can.

Everyone here is ahead of the game 👍

Thanks for posting, this really rounds out the Blonde Politics video that has been getting around.

I think we can all do something. I know our economy is tiny, but Australia buys way more from the US than they buy from us… and you know what a big chunk of that is? Services. Some of those are hard to shift but others are easier.

I’ve hosted all my websites and registered all my domains in the US for over 20 years.

That changed yesterday and I’m transferring everything over to Australia.

For Fedi, look at Australian servers where you can. Subscriptions? Fuck off Netflix et al. Get out of Google as much as you can. If you’re here you are probably already out of FB and Reddit, but leave anything else you can that is US based and try to support AU or EU.

Don’t buy US foods, cars, or technology where possible (let’s face it, most of those are crap anyway).

And you know what, most of the US based internet is shit now too. It was fun 20 years ago, but consistent enshittification has been the worst in the US. At least the EU is trying to fight it.

Yes our economy is tiny, but we can change more than you might think, and as the rest of the world probably will do similar, the US won’t be quite as well off as it thinks it is.

The worst case I’ve read about is BurningMan 2023, once enough people were on the mesh it completely stopped working and they had to write a special version of the app so it wouldn’t fail so badly… so it looks like there are ways to mitigate congested networks, but that is not stock. I admit I’m a complete newbie but there are some scathing comments about how poor Meshtastic is, though I’ve read others that say it’s fine for what it tries to do but not great for other purposes. So my gut tells me Reticulum would probably be a better long term protocol which you could develop a stand alone app for BBS, instead of piggybacking on Meshtastic app.

Absolutely love this idea. Am concerned anywhere with enough Meshtastic nodes for this to be busy enough to be useful would congest the mesh too much though, as I’ve been reading Meshtastic falls over completely once you have too many nodes communicating …? 🤔