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lukeasch21 5 days ago [-]
I would absolutely encourage everyone reading this to check out Reticulum [1] if you haven't already. I believe the base project might be in need of new maintainers(?) at the moment and the main dev has some very strong takes, but it is a very well-thought out approach to distributed networking at the protocol layer. The existing implementations out there include a desktop app which can function over the internet (IP) or a USB connection to some existing LoRA boards. I recently purchased a LilyGo T-Echo [2] and have had a great experience flashing the open-source firmware and using it connected to a desktop over USB or connected over Bluetooth to the fantastic new companion app Columba [3]. This app seriously makes Reticulum feel like a first class citizen when it comes to parity support for messaging. You can even send files/images (with limitations of course)! And since it works at the network level, you can make your own apps to run over Reticulum as well.
don’t forget that although it already works fine on lora, it’s a protocol that’s transport channel agnostic, and is gonna do great with other transports (halow, optical, wifi, whatever) when people finally start realizing that lora is never going to be able to keep up with bandwidth/speed requirements of anything much beyond simple text messaging.
although, i’ve already done real time voice calls over 1 hop of reticulum lora on and it works pretty ok.
edit - community wiki with getting started instructions is here:
Also great for position tracking, sensor data or motion detection etc.
rho138 4 days ago [-]
This for days. Cheap sensors that anyone can churn out for days and deploy to anywhere for weeks to years. No longer do I have to know if the garden beds need to be watered.
komali2 3 days ago [-]
For that specific use case, if you already have a component out there, couldn't you instead have it trigger water at some % water saturation?
montyanne 5 days ago [-]
I spent an entire month trying to build something with Reticulum, but there just isn’t great tooling for dealing with the protocol. Makes for a pretty infuriating devex if you’re just trying to build your app.
Neat concept but so many footguns that (imo) it’s not really sustainable to try bootstrapping.
Specifically, I had tried to port the stack to Rust no-std to use on nrf52 LoRA devices to use/abuse the existing MeshCore network to deliver reticulum packets. Turned out to be a nightmare just trying to figure out if my packets were even correctly formed.
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
Why is Reticulum and MeshCore the issue here and not rust?
LaserBeam1000 5 days ago [-]
I've never seen a working Reticulum network in the wild.
Only very very small testbeds.
forkerenok 5 days ago [-]
There are tons of entry points available now [0], and I get thousands of announcements every day.
It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat.
I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
fooqux 5 days ago [-]
I'd love to get a node working just for fun. But it also seems like a waste since I'm extremely rural. The closest node is 200+ miles away. The chances of seeing any other device but my own connect to it seem slim.
Is there still a reason to do this?
405nm 5 days ago [-]
because the protocol is transport agnostic, there are a lot of interfaces to the public reticulum net that you can access over TCP, I2P, or yggdrasil.
takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.
cheschire 4 days ago [-]
It works over TCP too. No need for radio hijinx.
So you basically eliminate futzing around with the hard parts until you understand the reticulum network itself.
Basically work your way down the OSI model instead of working your way up it.
randerson 4 days ago [-]
Perhaps there are others in your neighborhood in the same position, who would only get into it if there were other nodes. So be the first, get your friends into it, and maybe more nodes will follow. It's only $30 or so for a device.
They have a decent range (15 miles or more) so depending on how rural you are, you might be able to create a line of repeaters back to a major population center.
fooqux 4 days ago [-]
Lol, I'm rural enough that the concept of "neighborhood" has no meaning here. I'd have to have a neighbor first. And friends all live further away than 15 miles.
Your point still stands though.
brewtide 4 days ago [-]
I literally just put the meshtastic antenna on the roof today, in an old services box. Been in the window for months, had a few weird perfect weather moments show a few nodes and a ping. Put it on the roof, hours ago, nothing yet.
Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).
komali2 3 days ago [-]
Set it up, and when family visit, give them little LORA pucks to strap onto their belts when they go out on the property. Boom little property wide messaging network. Send out a text when dinner's ready!
bb88 5 days ago [-]
I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum).
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
DrewADesign 4 days ago [-]
For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.
bb88 2 days ago [-]
And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
DrewADesign 22 hours ago [-]
> Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore.
Why not anymore? I know meshtastic has dumb routing but I thought Meshcore was much better.
I think things like this are at high risk of having perfect be the enemy of good, but I’m not exactly in my comfort zone technically.
bb88 11 hours ago [-]
Because of the split. But your right, meshtastic does have dumb routing. And I haven't used meshcore, but I probably won't now until the dust settles on this for a while.
I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.
1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.
2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.
3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".
FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.
For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.
If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.
I was getting very good signals with this one [1].
I vaguely remember reading an article where someone had somehow transmitted digital signals over HAM, could feasibly be a transport for a reticulum network, right?
firesteelrain 3 days ago [-]
Digital is heavily used in ham radio. For example, FT8.
jubilanti 4 days ago [-]
> There are tons
I'm sorry but are you serious? That map shows 224 nodes in the world, fewer than 30 in the entire Western hemisphere. And only 24 in the world are using LoRa? Meshcore has 38,000 nodes, Meshtastic 10,000. Those two projects can actually be said to have "tons" of nodes.
It hurts your credibility. I trusted you, spent time trying to debug the map, thinking that something was wrong on my end... why am I only seeing 224 when there should be "tons", is there a filter, are these just super nodes....
So I looked into it because of what you said, but you raised expectations so much that I feel nothing but disappointment.
forkerenok 4 days ago [-]
Fair enough and apologies. Justified or not, I took the comment I was replying to out of context of the current (MeshCore, LoRa) topic.
I was referring to the TCP/IP, I2P and yggdrasil endpoints. And regardless, "tons" was an unnecessary exaggeration.
NamlchakKhandro 4 days ago [-]
too late. you're burned. time to buy a new passport.
405nm 4 days ago [-]
that map on rmap.world is only showing nodes that run dicoverable=yes in their configurations or something like that.
based upon the announce stream coming through my local node, i am seeing around 14k unique identities advertising over 21k unique application endpoints (destinations) over the course of the past month or so that i’ve been tracking it.
adammarples 5 days ago [-]
Which frequency do you get? Does it matter?
jonah 5 days ago [-]
It matters legally.
Different countries allow unlicensed use on different frequencies. Look up which is correct for your location.
adammarples 4 days ago [-]
Sadly there seems to be only one or two people in the uk on the reticulum network, I looked on rmap. Given these things have a range of maybe 8km I don't think that for all intents and purposes that it really exists yet.
amatecha 4 days ago [-]
LoRa can reach hundreds of km's, just depends on positioning. Current verified Meshtastic ground-to-ground distance record is 331km (205mi) which is pretty nuts. Between two mountain peaks, of course. :) https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/range-tests/
anthk 5 days ago [-]
I wish nomadnet got rewritten in Go.
NooneAtAll3 5 days ago [-]
be the change you want to see in the world :)
at the very least, try it. maybe it's simpler than you think
forkerenok 5 days ago [-]
There's a maturing implementation of the whole stack in go, so this is not far off.
anthk 5 days ago [-]
For Reticulum itself, yes, but sadly not for Nomadnet.
Trannosaur 5 days ago [-]
What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Meshtastic is the same. One of the main reasons I got interested in MeshCore was reading the Meshtastic trademark rules and just finding them... really really over the top.
SchemaLoad 5 days ago [-]
I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.
cge 4 days ago [-]
In my experience, amateur radio (both licensed and license-free) and 3d printing both seem to have cultural perspectives on open source that differ considerably from the regular open source software community.
But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious.
What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents.
> What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers?
Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out".
Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.
tbyehl 5 days ago [-]
I don't know any of the players but I'd bet they're licensed amateur radio operators.
amatecha 5 days ago [-]
Actually the opposite, tons of ppl in the meshtastic community (Discord) berate amateur radio operators. I stopped even discussing the subject because of how much derision I observed or was subjected to. Lots of insults and nasty jokes in passing as soon as the topic even comes up whatsoever. Kinda like your post, actually - offhanded derogatory remarks about an entire group of people solely because of the hobby they're involved in.
celsoazevedo 5 days ago [-]
The person in question has many radios in the background of his videos, so maybe the comment you've replied to is into something :P
fooqux 5 days ago [-]
Eh, it's a stereotype. In my opinion, they should always be questioned, especially when it's an unkind one like this.
Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
celsoazevedo 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, you're right.
atomicthumbs 4 days ago [-]
is it because amateur radio operators legally have standards they have to comply with?
RobotToaster 4 days ago [-]
Kinda, most hams are very rhadamanthine about following every tiny rule to the letter, or their even stricter interpretation of the spirit. The type of people who complain about young people not joining the hobby while insisting on maintaining strict licensing rules and tests. It's very much the polar opposite of hacker ethic.
pluralmonad 4 days ago [-]
The two biggest ham people I've known both, independently and separated by years, discussed enjoying war driving looking for "pirate" radio signals that they can report to the FCC. Amusing to find this is a cultural aspect of ham radio licensees.
4 days ago [-]
komali2 3 days ago [-]
I've got friends in the scene and their behavior about it reminds me of other types of friends I have
1. Amateur pilots
2. People late in their years getting into martials arts for the first time (will be the loudest "KIYA"s in the class and always doing the most aggressive deep bows lol)
3. Non libertarian gun nuts. Oh buddy the attention they pay to everything from how you load your gun at the range to how you've had it packed in your car.
I have specific individuals in mind for each of these categories and I say this without ill intent, I'm not trying to disparage this behavior, it just seems to be a specific kinda thing, where following the exact letter of written direction seems to be half the fun for them.
This in opposition to some other types I know who aren't having fun unless SOME rule is being broken...
ctime 4 days ago [-]
Off topic but rhadamanthine? Is this word zeitgeist now?
It's just a word I like to use, it has a nice sound to it.
amatecha 4 days ago [-]
Nice, I hadn't heard that word before - thanks!
ajsnigrutin 4 days ago [-]
This + amateur radio is designed to be open, no encryption, anyone can talk with anyone, and if you're "being stupid" (to not use other terms), anyone can tell you so.
The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
M4rkJW 4 days ago [-]
You can legally transmit for any emergency, regardless of licensing status. The emergency definition is purposefully left ambiguous so as to apply to many situations. Lost in the woods? Go ahead, transmit; the FCC isn't going to knock on your door if you live. Every HAM should know this already.
4 days ago [-]
austinthetaco 4 days ago [-]
This is the correct info. Anyone in an emergency is allowed to use the amateur frequencies. Just got my technician license a couple weeks ago, emergency use is even actually on the test!
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
That rule applies only to amateur stations (it says so right in the text!), not unlicenced individuals. What an amateur station is is defined in the beggining of the document, and yes, that requires the a duly-authroized (licenced) operator.
The last thing you want in an emergency event is some prepper with a baofeng transmitting on a repeaters frequency without a subtone set (because he's too stupid to pass an exam that 10yo kids can pass) effectively jamming it for proper emergency users. The other thing is, that chances are no one will actually hear you, especially on simplex. With tools like garmin inreach, carrying an HT with you instead of something proper and relying on that to save you in a time of need is just stupid.
Ham radio is like driving, you need experience to do it, and even some experienced people still do it badly. Trying to figure out how to drive by reading a car manual while the flood waters are rising is going to be a pretty bad experience.
austinthetaco 4 days ago [-]
Well, according to multiple times where people have checked with FCC enforcement folks, the spirit of the ruling covers unlicensed users operating in amateur bands for real emergencies.
ajsnigrutin 4 days ago [-]
The rules are clear here, there is no "spirit" in the law. The problem is, that the myth of somehow being "saved" by having a baofeng with you is spreading and people will die because of that. Hopefully only the baofengers and not others, affected by people who would effectively jam multiple others operating on eg. a repeater.
Ham radios don't just appear, someone has to buy them, buying one without getting a proper licence is just stupid.... but many (especially americans) do so. There is GMRS, there is FRS, people could take those radios, try them out when not in an emergency, but nope... everyone wants that uv-5r for some reason.
Every one of those preppers should get licenced first, go to some hiking trail, some remote..ish pota park and try to do an unspotter POTA activation there... and after failing horribly, they'll rethink their emergency communications. Somehow even licenced hams (about which I assume none actually tried doing an unspotted pota from some hiking trail) support and spread the "just buy a baofeng for emergencies". In reality... they're useless in most cases. If you're somewhere remote, no one will hear you anyway, and if you're stuck at home, having something like a starlink will actually help you reach someone, much better than a radio, especially a handheld 2m/70cm one. You might get some good but useless DX with an HF one, but you won't be setting up an NVIS antenna in a snow storm.
But hey... try explaining that to preppers.
austinthetaco 4 days ago [-]
the rules arent clear, which is why 97.403 and 97.405 have been argued nauseam for a VERY long time. It's intentionally vague so that some people cant claim being out of soap as an emergency. But during a real emergency (someone had a heart attack on the floor, you're being chased by an axe murderer, etc) every single representative has said that the spirit of those parts covers the person. I don't disagree that people should get licensed, mostly so they know how and where to operate the radios or god forbid we do have a collapse and do have to fix up our own radios and antennas.
ajsnigrutin 4 days ago [-]
It's not actually vague, if they wanted "everyone" to do that, they'd use "everyone","anyone" or some similar wording, not specifically limit the exception to amateur station. Someone chose that for a reason, and it's a good reason... even licenced hams can cause trouble (eg. forget to turn off a simplex repeater on a radio, "mars mod" it and then jam the fire department frequencies with it,... a few weeks ago), and people who can't pass the simple exam don't need such radios, they can get by with GMRS (if they're from US and able to fill out an online form) for FRS/PMR (if they're not) or even MURS (again in US). There is no real difference in range between an uv-5r and a uv-5g (ham and gmrs radios), and a very small difference with frs/pmr (you need a line of sight anyway).
If someone had a heart attack, somewhere remote enough, that there is no cell signal, using a GMRS radio will have the same effect and range than a ham radio (i'm talking about 5W HTs here). Using something like a garmin inreach would actually get them help, but still, preppers want their baofengs, and for some reason don't want the *g models. That's why i get bothered when people promote ham radios, especially baofengs for emergencies, because they'll be useless in most cases and people who don't know that, will rely on them instead of getting a proper tool for the job. Many of those even have that in their pockets right now (some samsungs and iphone can do satellite communications already). Promoting the "you don't need a licence in emergencies" and then turning to "you'll be breaking the law anyway but who cares" mentality means that people don't learn even the basics (if they did, they'd be able to pass the exam) but still rely on those radios to get help.. and in turn, people will die because of that.
As i said before.. if you have a heart attack in the middle of nowhere, a baofeng won't get you help. If you went with gmrs/frs, you'd test it out and see the limited range and that no one is actually listening out there (unless arranged, and that person is in simplex range), if you get licenced, then you'd do the same, call out cqs into the void until you got bored, but if you do the "just buy one, you don't need licences..." (even if you do need to be licenced), people will be using that radio for the first time during an active emergency and fail in getting help with them. Stop promoting the untrue myth of getting help with a ham radio, instead offer proper tools for the job and people will actually be able to get help.
austinthetaco 4 days ago [-]
You're arguing for why people shouldn't buy a ham for prepping without a license or weirdly arguing that someone who is totally unprepared should've just happened to have a garmin on them. Realistically most people aren't toally prepared. A wife went to a remote cabin with their husband who is a ham op and has a heart attack, someone falls off a cliff while taking a photo of someone with their phone and the only thing is a mobile vhf/uhf radio in their car, etc etc etc. there are countless reasons why someone unlicensed might end up needing to transmit on amateur bands in an emergency, which again is why it's vague. You're claiming its not even though FCC enforcers themselves have said otherwise, so you should probably go argue with the fcc instead of strangers on the internet.
RobotToaster 4 days ago [-]
Preventing a more serious harm (Necessity) is a common law defence against most crimes.
linsomniac 5 days ago [-]
I will say in Northern Colorado a LOT of the people involved in the MeshCore are HAMs.
neltnerb 5 days ago [-]
Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam.
You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun.
I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out.
Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing?
At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case.
So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
linsomniac 5 days ago [-]
I came up with a way to install a repeater 20ft up a mast that's been on top of the building my office is in, but it's been idle since the TV station that used to be in here left. It has decent reachability, but unfortunately it's not at a particularly high point of the city, it has great reacability into the University and can reach my house, but there's a ridge to the south that puts the antenna more like ground level if it was on that ridge.
teachrdan 4 days ago [-]
Next project: putting a repeater on that ridge!
satvikpendem 4 days ago [-]
Ham (radio) is not an acronym, no need to capitalize the letters.
walrus01 4 days ago [-]
Speaking as a person who works professionally in fcc part 101 licensed point to point microwave systems carrying IP data, I have less than zero patience for the BS and shenanigans of analog ham radio enthusiasts.
They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens.
In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
austinthetaco 4 days ago [-]
Not sure why you're denigrating HAM radio folks. They have in fact historically already been useful and critical in emergencies, most recently in 2024 for hurricane Helene. Just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean its not. I mean RACES is even a whole thing explicitly outlined because the government realizes the value of some ham radio operators.
walrus01 4 days ago [-]
It takes real money and infrastructure to build resilient emergency communication networks on a county or state sized scale. And HAMs just don't have it.
Go look at the budget documents for the tower sites and entire radio communication networks that support public safety networks (police, fire, ambulance) on a scale of somewhere the size of King County, WA. Properly engineered hilltop tower sites with well maintained generators, redundant radio links, etc. Amateurs just don't have the resources to do these things properly and are a distraction at best.
My opinion is not new or novel - the people who built the att long lines microwave network in the pre fiber optic era very rarely if ever had anything to do with ham radio. Persons concerned with actual mission critical emergency communication systems learn the hard way that amateur dilettantes just don't have the financial resources or time to do it properly.
If you want to build an emergency communications network, it's going to cost money in real equipment and paying for the man hours of full time equivalent employees to build and run it.
austinthetaco 4 days ago [-]
You're moving goalposts here. They have already been involved in emergency communication numerous times, its not the most optimal emergency communication, but critical nonetheless because of it's decentralized and among-the-people nature. Some elmer with 80ft tall tower in his backyard sometimes has a better chance at communicating with random operators that are at the location of a post-disaster scenario. If you don't want to look at helene, look at 9/11 where they became the primary communication for some red cross, medical facilities and personnel, and even new york's OEM.
ajsnigrutin 4 days ago [-]
That's unique to american hams.
Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
walrus01 4 days ago [-]
Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion. I can send an ICMP ping to something I know is in Svalbard Norway across the regular Internet and get a reply, but I don't pin a postcard to a cork board on my wall celebrating my amazing technical accomplishment.
Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload.
A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
doom2 4 days ago [-]
I really don't understand this line of argument and why you seem to be taking offense at an entire hobby. It's like asking why people who maintain home networking labs spend so much time and effort doing that when they could be putting those skills to better use at companies like Cisco. Or why people assemble computers at all when you can just get one from Best Buy. Why do people waste time with Raspberry Pi when you could do something cool with a real, existing exascale supercomputer?
There are many different niches in the amateur radio hobby. Some people want to buy off the shelf radios and antennas to make contacts over the air. Some people want to experiment with their homebrew designs and see how far their signal reaches. Some people want to experiment with very low power radios. Some people (including a Nobel prize winner!) want to experiment with new digital communication protocols for amateur radio use. And yes, some people want to use amateur radio for emergency communication purposes.
Why is it so wasteful for any of these groups to do what they're doing instead of applying their skills to something "useful"? Why is it any more wasteful than participants in other hobbies? That also ignores the fact that many amateur radio operators _do_ apply themselves to "useful" things: they're electrical engineers, physicists, software engineers, educators, military or emergency personnel, etc.
amatecha 4 days ago [-]
> Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion
It's a hobby. "Let people enjoy things". Please remember this: it's a hobby. It's right there in the name: amateur radio. We're not trying to be world-class industry-leading RF engineers.
walrus01 4 days ago [-]
Neither are the nycmesh people, who seem to have a fair bit of hobby-grade fun in doing what they do in their spare time, but the end result of their hard work provides significantly greater real-world end to end communication systems for people to use... If the purpose of amateur radio is to communicate, DXing and such doesn't really accomplish much real world utility.
No, not everything in the world has to be utilitarian or accomplish a purpose. But amateur radio is continually living in the past, their entire communication paradigm is often based on something akin to circuit-switched networking when the packet based networking world passed them by quite some years ago.
ajsnigrutin 4 days ago [-]
Sure, and walking uphill just do walk downhill is pointless too, and people are also bragging they've gone very far uphill to go very far back downhill,... they could be doing much more useful things instead of climbing mt. everest. Why bother, when you're higher than that (almost) every time you fly in a plane?
But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube.
Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
doom2 4 days ago [-]
From personal experience, I'd just say that the number of emcomm-focused hams I've encountered in the hobby has been quite small but even when I have, they are no more or less annoying than anyone else I've met who are involved in emergency management. I guess I don't understand where people get the impression that the whole hobby is focused on emcomms. Do people really think every American amateur radio operator drives a Ford F-450 packed to the gills with antennas and radio equipment?
fooqux 5 days ago [-]
So?
busterarm 5 days ago [-]
IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences.
I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others.
That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
jimnotgym 5 days ago [-]
I have an amateur radio licence and I agree. One reason I rarely operate...
I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
toyg 5 days ago [-]
Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
Hurt people hurt people, as they say. The entire field is held back because of trauma. "I could invent something amazing but get screwed out of it because someone else has money and lawyers" is just no way to live. The problem for radio is I could invent the most magical amazing transmitter, but it's worth absolutely nothing if there's no corresponding receiver. Which is to say, open standards are everything. Meshtastic/MeshCore/etc are interesting because they're open. It doesn't have to be. Off-grid mesh communication is a solved problem, just buy a GoTenna. Problem is it's proprietary. But it works, with a whole lot less drama.
ted_dunning 4 days ago [-]
That is certainly the myth that drives this.
There is also a fair bit of demographics at play. Many of the people writing these little applications grew up and imprinted before open source was much of a thing.
5 days ago [-]
busterarm 5 days ago [-]
It's kind of alarming how much more enjoyable the less legal communities in the radio hobby are to spend time around.
DrewADesign 4 days ago [-]
I get the sense that a lot of the hams I’ve met have a framed hall-monitor sash from their high school years.
I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
bobsomers 5 days ago [-]
I don't really think its fair to lump hams into that behavioral bucket. It's certainly a personality type that tends to get attracted to lots of different technical hobbies.
busterarm 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mystraline 5 days ago [-]
> IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences.
Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types.
I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump.
Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community.
And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF.
I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
busterarm 5 days ago [-]
It's not even just a pro-trump thing. That's not even the thing particularly annoying about hams because that's annoying across all of society. I can tolerate disagreeing with peoples opinions but not disagreeable/disharmonioous behavior.
Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny.
The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
ajsnigrutin 4 days ago [-]
It's a simple exam that 10yo kids pass all the time. If someone is complaining about the licencing process, the problem is on that individual, not the system.
Like with roads and cars, radio spectrum is a very limited and very shared resource, and there has to be some regulation, or else some Elon Musk-type person would already take it for themselves for a commercial reason.
It's also self-policed, so that means that hams have to find the problematic entities and hope that authorities with legal power act on those reports.
The devices can also be uncertified (self-certified by a ham technically), so you can cause all sorts of havoc for many other entities, like actual emergency services (a case not long ago in US) or worse.
If you are not able, or for some reason or another don't want to get licenced, there are other ways to communicate, like mentioned meshtastic, which doesn't require a licence on ISM bands, or PMR/FRS radios (or gmrs in us, which does require a licence but you don't have to learn the radio basics for the exam).
Again, like with roads and cars, you expect others there to be mentally capable enough to pass that simple exam and follow the basic rules on the air. If not, they can get a bicycle and argue on the bicycle lane with other cyclists. And the ham exam is much cheaper and easier than a driving exam (in most developed countries at least,
the driving one costs 1keur++ if you finish optimally, whereas over here, a full intro to ham course (a few weeks, usually on zoom) with a printed book and the actual exam costs <100eur, even less with a pdf instead of a book)
mystraline 4 days ago [-]
The problem isnt the test. In the USA the test is cheap. Books can easily be acquired online.
The problem is hams - the people who are habitually are on amateur radio.
I find them to be incredibly anti-digital, holier than thou, loud about hard-conservative positions, misogynist, racist, and more. And when Ive tried to further the art and science of radio comms, hams are some of the first to talk down what I contributed.
They are people who I dont, and dont want to associate myself with.
Ive also known others that made that assumption when I said I was a ham. Lots of people have had those experiences, and also chosen not to associate with them.
I'm sure this doesnt apply to "all Hams". It does apply to a supermajority in the USA, enough to say that I do not want to be a ham any longer. I already refused to communicate with them, nor associate with them.
amatecha 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, all that stuff depends where you are located. Up here in Vancouver amateur radio community, any kind of bigoted/discriminatory/exclusionary crap is totally not accepted or tolerated. There are always people experimenting with new things, sharing knowledge/experience, helping each other out. Heck, I built a portable radio pack and made a blog post about it, and my local club included my post (with my permission) in their monthly newsletter. I've also contributed photos to them and attended numerous community events -- always 100% welcoming and there's a strong educational/sharing vibe to all their events. When I hear people complaining about "hams" I'm always thankful to have seen almost none of this stuff locally.
4 days ago [-]
dostick 5 days ago [-]
What is IYKYK ? If you know you know?
DrewADesign 4 days ago [-]
IYKYK
sweetheart 5 days ago [-]
yeah
celsoazevedo 5 days ago [-]
For now, I don't think it's fair to compare MeshCore with MeshTastic in terms of enforcement as that has not happened with MeshCore. This seems to be one guy getting a trademark in the UK without the approval of other members of the team. They're not going after anyone. Not yet, at least.
queenkjuul 5 days ago [-]
All meshtastic code is GPL, the name "meshtastic" is owned by the company that developed it. You can use any of the code, you can't use their name outside their rules. This is absolutely no different than, say, Firefox. The trademark policy is very permissable and you don't even need their permission to use the name on a commercial product.
I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.
toyg 5 days ago [-]
Nitpicking, but IIRC, Wi-Fi was born largely as a marketing effort rather than a technical one. Interoperability was an afterthought.
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
That's overstated. IEEE 802.11 started it all, and they're a standards body. The point of making a standard is to interoperate. Early implementations had problems with interoperability, yes, but interoperability was central to the ecosystem. "Wifi", as in the Wi-fi Alliance was absolutely a marketing thing because need marketing and branding to get consumer adoption but there was also a certification process to it that was a technical process and without that, it wouldn't have worked.
pwndByDeath 4 days ago [-]
The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm
zobzu 4 days ago [-]
they all hope to make lot of money of of it.
meshcore has a marketing team spamming reddit all day and a mao to make you believe people use it right now. then you connect to yhe mesh and you're utterly alone there. at least meshtastic has real users lol.
nonethewiser 5 days ago [-]
>We have always been wary of AI generated code, but felt everyone is free to do what they want and experiment, etc. But, one of our own, Andy Kirby, decided to branch out and extensively use Claude Code, and has decided to aggressively take over all of the components of the MeshCore ecosystem: standalone devices, mobile app, web flasher and web config tools.
>And, he’s kept that small detail a secret - that it’s all majority vibe coded.
Without any more context, I am highly suspicious of this framing.
1) Someone "taking over" the ecosystem seems like an entirely different issue. How is this possible? Does it mean he's publishing things and people want to use them?
2) Is the code bad? It sounds like they had no idea he was using AI. That seems to imply there was nothing wrong with the code as-is. Why not judge it on it's merits?
>The team didn’t feel it was our place to protest, until we recently discovered that Andy applied for the MeshCore Trademark (on the 29th March, according to filings) and didn’t tell any of us.
Taking this at face value, this is indeed hostile and bad.
But no, I'm not going to get outraged that someone is simply using Claude Code.
IshKebab 5 days ago [-]
> Is the code bad? It sounds like they had no idea he was using AI. That seems to imply there was nothing wrong with the code as-is. Why not judge it on it's merits?
Anyone that has used AI at all knows this isn't how it works. AI is extremely good at producing plausible-but-wrong outputs. It's literally optimised for plausibility, which happens to coincide with correctness a lot of the time. When it doesn't you get code that seems good and is therefore very difficult to judge on its merits.
With human written code it's a lot easier to tell if it's good or not.
There are exceptions to this - usually if you have some kind of oracle like that security work that used AddressSanitizer to verify security bugs, or if you're cloning a project you can easily compare the behaviour to the original project. Most of the time you don't have that luxury though.
SchemaLoad 5 days ago [-]
It's also easy to overwhelm reviewers with far more code than they can possibly review. And it's also the hardest stuff to review where the code at surface level looks totally fine, but takes long hours of actual testing to make sure it works.
nonethewiser 4 days ago [-]
If the code is bad why not lambast him for pushing bad code? If he's pushing straight to main why have such shitty controls? If it got through review whats the problem? AI in-and-of-itself is not bad. They never substantiate beyond saying he used Claude Code a lot.
doug_durham 4 days ago [-]
Just read the code. There is nothing keeping people from reading the code.
ChrisRR 4 days ago [-]
As far as I know the meshcore app and meshos are closed source
cuu508 4 days ago [-]
I can't find the source code either for the official MeshCore app or for MeshOS -- where can I read the code?
neltnerb 4 days ago [-]
It's so weird right? I keep hearing people say it's open source but like... where's the code then? I've tried to find it. I can find stuff for core components, but they lock features behind a delay-wall in the app. If it was open source that stuff would be gone immediately.
The vibecoder was on MeshOS, which indeed is not open source
cuu508 3 days ago [-]
That's the board firmware, not the official Meshcore Android or IOS app.
neltnerb 3 days ago [-]
I admit it was a super meta-funny response, because everyone I see that's into meshcore thinks it's open source because of that repository and posts it after a 30 second google search when questioned.
Then you ask them to actually find a source file for the apps and they go quiet. It's wild how much it looks like open source from a casual glance.
securicat 4 days ago [-]
Do folks not write tests and review their own code (AI generated or not)?
Also, citation needed:
> With human written code it's a lot easier to tell if it's good or not
prism56 5 days ago [-]
Agreed. I use meshcore and have multiple repeaters setup. I don't care about people using ai assisted coding but I think it should be disclosed especially if its closed source.
Now the trademark take over seems crazy especially given Andy hasn't contributed to the github project, only personal for profit add ons.
I do also think that the meshcore core team have "tacked on" and tried to enforce a stronger narrative with their anti ai coding bias.
jeromegv 4 days ago [-]
It wasn't ai assisted coding, it was vibe coding from someone with no real coding background. A communication protocol can't be vibe coded, how do you enforce security if the person is unable to understand what the tool created?
Especially when they try to hide that they were using those tools in the first place
nonethewiser 4 days ago [-]
>It wasn't ai assisted coding, it was vibe coding from someone with no real coding background.
Can you elaborate on this?
I'd agree that is problematic. But that's not what the article said. The article just said he was using Claude Code a lot. It's ridiculous to equivocate those two things. That's what I have an issue with.
consp 5 days ago [-]
> only personal for profit add ons
In that context it is quite logical to take a trademark out once the project is mature enough so you can profit off other people's work.
Considering their user base does not like the hidden vibe coded idea I don't think this is bias but a sane rationalisation.
stingraycharles 4 days ago [-]
There’s a lot of framing in how questions are asked. I’m going to bet asking the community “Would you like more features if they’re made using AI assistance?” is going to get wildly different results.
zdragnar 4 days ago [-]
"AI assistance" isn't really an honest representation of the claim of what happened is, though.
bigiain 5 days ago [-]
"I wrote an iPhone app, so now I have the right to trademark 'Apple'."
axegon_ 4 days ago [-]
Disagree: I applaud them for doing this. Anyone that says they've reviewed the 1000 lines of slop any AI has spit out is simply lying to everyone and even potentially themselves and has never done a single extensive code review in their life. Reading 1000 lines of text is one thing, reading and analyzing the complexity implications and edge cases in code - no chance. The "I've reviewed the slop" response is the reasons why 0 days and leaks are happening more than ever: because no one really reads the code cause "I vibe-coded it". An extensive and comprehensive code review may take days, and no slopper has ever done that. I'll get a 100 line pr and going over it can easily take hours, especially when something looks wrong and I need to test it. And it's a good reason why I'd never trust the "You are absolutely correct, apologies for the oversight, here's a revised version:"
nonethewiser 4 days ago [-]
>Disagree: I applaud them for doing this. Anyone that says they've reviewed the 1000 lines of slop any AI has spit out
You're assuming the thing in question - that it's just AI slop. They dont offer any insight on that - they merely say he used Claude Code a lot. It shows a real lack of understanding of AI tools to equivocate those two things.
axegon_ 4 days ago [-]
No, it shows responsibility and critical thinking: I don't care if it's slaupecode, alanturingai++ code or whatever other slop machine anyone uses. It's the fact that no one and I mean NO ONE is capable of code reviewing that much crap and everyone that has written any code that was meant to last knows it: pouring a ton crap of code, even as a human, is the easy part if you learn the basics. The hard part is analyzing the problem, considering and addressing edge cases, exploits, memory leaks, resources, constraints and limitations - this is what a programmer is fundamentally responsible for and this is the only skill that matters. The code is just an abstraction, which was never the issue. Sloppers wash their hands with "look at how good it works" and "look at how beautiful the code is" and it's all fun and games before a production system crashes because, as I said, no slopper or an actual programmer has the ability to review 6000 line merge request so they hit "lgtm". Or better yet, outsource the problem to another slop machine. Anyone who believes that "AI tools" are in any shape or form viable for production, clearly do not understand a fundamental concept, called propagation of uncertainty[1].
"Sooo productive", sure, buddy, and when it breaks you have no idea why it broke and ultimately you don't know the codebase. Instructions.md containing:
```
* make no mistakes
* don't hallucinate
```
Is the clear-cut evidence that we are speed running towards a technological apocalypse. Ironically, I'm in favour of it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better and people to get back to using their brains, I'm all for it.
I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown. The "SHTF" types that get involved with this tend to just taint the whole concept for me. I was/am interested in the use cases for building sensor networks, but most of the chatter seems to be around people who just want to send Hello World type texts back and forth, without realizing how poorly a network like this would perform in a real SHTF scenario.
alnwlsn 5 days ago [-]
I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS where you walk around a large camp and "capture" different regions. It worked great for that and was a lot of fun.
If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing.
To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.
Levitating 5 days ago [-]
> I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS
Can you name the game? Meshtastic has got me thinking about that kind of stuff.
alnwlsn 4 days ago [-]
It was just something a friend of mine came up with - we called it "Area Capture" or something (and was ironically, mostly vibe-coded).
There were 4 or 5 "color" teams. Each one carries a meshtastic node, and they all report to a central server back at base. The play field was roughly a square mile divided up into a grid of smaller squares. If you walk into one and it's past the cooldown time, it claims it for your team. Most squares at the end of two hours wins. The server would send out updates over meshtastic also: "Blue captures H12" "Red has 18", etc. If you were at the base station, you got to see it all play out live on a big map.
There was another one played at night which was a hide and seek game / capture the flag sort of game. It would tell the seekers some limited information about the seekers, and each side had special functions they could use. Hiders could "go invisible" or fake their location for a certain time. Seekers could call a limited number of "drone strikes" on different squares. The game ends when either the hiders are caught, or they make it to a specific target location.
Lots of possibility for that sort of thing with Meshtastic. I guess either could have run on a phone since now even rural camping areas have decent cell coverage these days, but that's not quite as impressive.
RankingMember 5 days ago [-]
I feel the same way, and both mobile apps are pretty janky, with Meshtastic being extra obnoxious because the UI teams between Android and Apple apparently don't talk to each other- very hard to onboard/answer questions from someone new if you're on a different platform than them.
It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.
takipsizad 5 days ago [-]
I largely agree and want to add more,I also think the lack of standards also will effect it's usability in a real shtf scenario. why should I use meshstastic over meshcore for example. I also don't think lora will be in my mind in that kind of scenario.
komali2 3 days ago [-]
> SHTF
We have a pretty big meshtastic/meshcore / reticulum scene in Taiwan organized through g0v's civic defense group. It's a nontrivial issue for us when the PRC keeps cutting our cables - which is why Audrey Tang was hitting up Starlink back when they were the digital minister.
Basically we very much may need these secondary networks someday.
I really want to get plausible "Walkaway" intranet set up here with e.g. mirrored Wikipedia and whatnot, I don't know enough yet to do that though.
If you want to build sensor stuff you should have a look a LoRaWAN.
Get a basestation from Mikrotik and use Chirpstack as backend.
This setup is commercially very very battlefield proven.
Insanity 5 days ago [-]
SHTF?
EdwardDiego 4 days ago [-]
Often refers to doomsday preppers.
brk 5 days ago [-]
Shit Hits The Fan.
the_gipsy 5 days ago [-]
Is this client app still closed source? Non-starter for me, also a strong indicator that anything like this was bound to happen, and this will not be the end of it.
Shame to hear that: the protocol works well, scaling up to thousands of nodes across hundreds of miles. This is the local mesh where I live:
https://cascadiamesh.org/map/
You don't have to use the closed source app; there's an open-source client too, there are Blackberry-style client devices which don't require an app at all, and all the actual firmware is open source (MIT).
mtlynch 5 days ago [-]
>there are Blackberry-style client devices which don't require an app at all, and all the actual firmware is open source (MIT).
Worth noting that the Blackberry-style devices are also closed source and the hardware and software is way worse than Blackberry was 22 years ago.[0]
Good to know - I've only used the companion radios. That firmware and the repeater firmware is open, which is what seems important to me.
I wasn't expecting the T-Deck to be anything more sophisticated than a walkie-talkie for SMS, but it's a bummer than the UI code isn't open.
amatecha 5 days ago [-]
Wow, the coverage is nuts. I should hop on, looks like I've got solid coverage in my area. Been too lazy to properly give it a try but obviously I really should! Thanks for the link!
sidewndr46 5 days ago [-]
This reduced my interest to zero in this as well, when I learned it was closed source
celsoazevedo 5 days ago [-]
Search for "meshcore-open". It's an open client, still in alpha, but already does many of the basics. Github only for now, I believe.
jkingsman 4 days ago [-]
I develop an open-source self-hosted client (very mobile friendly) for base-station radios that you want to use from anywhere, and also support MQTT/community observers/bots/webhooks/etc. It spawned out of my need for a daily-driver client that wasn't chained to the radio, and turned into a super fully featured companion client for power users.
The radio API and firmware is open; I have no ire for people who choose to make software closed source so that it can be monetized when there are SO many other options that in many cases supersede the functionality of the closed source option.
I love using AI to develop and I think it is important in modern development, but you definitely have to disclose it because there is a difference between AI and human written code is key.
It is essential to disclose it.
preisschild 4 days ago [-]
Not only because of that, but if you vibe code huge parts of the project, it is questionable if you really have the rights to agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin and to license it under that specific code bases LICENSE.
CyberDildonics 5 days ago [-]
You're right, I don't know who would down vote or disagree with this. It's not easy to figure out what a program is doing, but if someone wrote it you at least know there was some sort of intention there. With AI you have no idea why it's there.
All over the internet people are putting up vibe coded projects and no one says that's what it is up front. They all just say "I made this" and they are more than happy to take in the adulation of people impressed that they made something with an animated pattern.
Then when they finally admit that they wrote nothing and don't know how any of it works people start to say "nothing wrong with using ai", as if using it is the same as copying it verbatim, not understanding anything and taking complete credit as if you wrote it while lying about how it was used.
tamimio 5 days ago [-]
Ah, the cliche story of most open source projects! Still, that was a dick move to hijack the project just because you were the “front end” or the promoter, and found that AI can help so you backstabbed the team and hijacked the trademark as well, class A a-hole!
Just a word of caution, claude code might look impressive if your knowledge is shallow or intermediate in a topic, but if you know what you’re doing, once you dig deeper it starts to introduce plenty of scope creeps into your code base, piling one on top of another that you won’t even recognize your own code shortly.
KurSix 4 days ago [-]
It’s hilarious how people are blaming Claude for a human being a total snake. Trademark squatting is the oldest legal trick in the book. AI just gave Andy the leverage to fake "official" status and look busy while the rest of the team did the actual heavy lifting. The tech just fast-tracked the inevitable fallout tbh
thih9 5 days ago [-]
As they say, there is an .io[1] website with the "MESHCORE" logo, and a .co.uk[2] website with the "MESHCORE(tm)" logo.
I’ve never used this project and don’t know anyone involved.
But it sure seems interesting how every time I hear about someone just doing a “rewrite it all with AI“ they seem to turn out to be a giant jerk.
Maybe not the only one. I don’t know enough backstory to judge how trustworthy this post is.
But the signal to noise ratio on my little test above seems pretty good.
mtlynch 5 days ago [-]
>Would you trust AI generated mesh firmware?
It's ridiculous to me that they're concerned about the trustworthiness of AI-generated code when their code quality is so low. They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3]
Last I checked, there's little validity checking in the code, so it's possible to broadcast nonsense values (like GPS coordinates outside of Earth's bounds) and the code happily accepts it.
And that's fine if they're just like a scrappy upstart doing their best, but it annoys me to be so high and mighty about their code quality when they don't invest in it.
I really want to like MeshCore but I feel like its stewardship makes it hard. The main two people I know running it are Scott Powell and Liam Cottle, both of whom are trying to build businesses on closed-source layers on top of the firmware. I don't think there's anything wrong with an open-core business model (I ran such a business myself), but it creates perverse incentives where the core maintainers try to suppress information about the open-source alternatives and push their own closed-source paid products.
Also, MeshCore's recommended broadcast settings for the US are illegal.[4] I emailed the Liam and Scott about this months ago, and they ignored me.
Wow, #4 is frustrating. (Disclosure: am a ham, but not one of the uptight ones. I'm not personally offended when someone breaks the rules, and I'm not gonna run off and call the FCC or something. But I am concerned when they don't seem to know or care why.)
First, I don't know if their interpretation of the rules is correct. For the sake of argument, I'll assume it is. More importantly, most other people in that thread seem to be going along with the idea that it is correct. This is how it reads to me:
Submitter: We're violating the rules and should make this change.
Replier 1: That change would be inconvenient in Seattle so we're not doing it.
Replier 2: It wouldn't work well in Boston, either, so it's a no-go.
Part of me wants to shake them. This isn't 'Nam. There are rules. Whatever you think about the FCC regulations, they're not voluntary, and they certainly don't have an opt-out for "it wouldn't work as well that way". To a first approximation, everyone else using the public airwaves is more or less following the law. If following the law makes your project not work as well, that's your problem. It's on you to fix your project so that it's legal to use.
I'm not one of those old hams who gets hyper cranky about this stuff, but I do understand how they come to be that way. The only reason we can use the spectrum at all is that people are mostly using it legally so that their work isn't interfering with everyone else trying to use the same public resource.
nonethewiser 5 days ago [-]
>Would you trust AI generated mesh firmware?
This is also a loaded question. The only specifics they've offered are that he simply used Claude Code. Um... OK? Do the tests pass? Did his changes add any security flaws? Regressions that were untested?
mschuster91 5 days ago [-]
> It's ridiculous to me that they're concerned about the trustworthiness of AI-generated code when their code quality is so low.
Agreed, but at least it's somewhat sensibly structured. AI? Good lord you'll end up with a slopaghetti mess.
> They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3]
Two people, 540 issues and 270 PRs open at the moment. Not wanting to be that guy... but do the math. The reviewer team is small as hell and after this drama (which probably kept both of them busy with BS) they'll likely be even less willing to trust others.
If you want to stand a better chance at getting your code into other people's hands, go and contact the person behind the Evo fork. IIRC he's part of Hansemesh, Germany's biggest regional MC.
I have heard indirectly multiple times now that the only two ways to get a PR of interest merged is to either gather enough people to Like the issue on Github or to join the Discord and ask.
What's an example of a GPS coordinate "outside earth's bounds"?
mtlynch 5 days ago [-]
A longitude that's outside the range of [-180, +180] or a latitude that's outside the range of [-90, +90].
jstanley 5 days ago [-]
Ok but that would still be on earth
mtlynch 5 days ago [-]
What do you mean? Is the non-existent millionth floor of the Empire State Building still part of the Empire State Building?
Also, I'm assuming we're in agreement that software should not accept invalid GPS coordinates from untrusted peers regardless of semantics about whether or not they're within Earth's bounds.
CyberDildonics 5 days ago [-]
What do you mean? Is the non-existent millionth floor of the Empire State Building still part of the Empire State Building?
Okay, fair point, but I still feel like it's nitpicking minor wording. My point is that MeshCore should validate untrusted data.
ted_dunning 4 days ago [-]
32˚N 80˚W altitude 1000 miles
NooneAtAll3 5 days ago [-]
what's even the need to transmit/receive GPS as part of the protocol?
randerson 5 days ago [-]
Its optional but it helps to see where nodes are on a map, and would be useful in (for example) a search & rescue operation.
bigiain 5 days ago [-]
"useful in (for example) a search & rescue"
I can't read that without assuming the real intent is to deliver bombs accurately, but the startup pitching it knows that'd get bad press, and the investors all know exactly what it really means...
_djo_ 4 days ago [-]
Meshtastic/MeshCore have nothing valuable to offer in terms of delivering bombs accurately. Moreover, militaries already have access to much more robust radio messaging hardware and protocols for data and location transmission.
The main reason both Meshtastic and MeshCore have location data as a part of the protocol is because they emerged from the Ham community which has always taken its role in search and rescue seriously, and because it also appealed early on for other off-grid uses like hiking.
tiagod 4 days ago [-]
I came across this Andy Kirby guy on youtube, and his videos really came across as very sensationalized, exaggerated and clickbaity, which drew me away from meshcore, as I associated him with the project organization. This seems to validate my gut feeling.
jolly-good 4 days ago [-]
Aggressive promotion by badmouthing any other mesh, and now this - seems rather British. :)
jauntywundrkind 5 days ago [-]
Spicy take but I think this whole Lora thing is a dead end bad technology not worth our time.
Wifi HaLow 802.11ah is finally out & available, sometimes at ok prices. We don't really have ad-hoc communication pioneered for wifi, but it's doable and we ought lean into it, rather than using some totally different stack, especially one that is under strict control of a single company.
What we learn doing wifi halow can directly port and improve the rest of ways we connect. That would be grand.
Avamander 5 days ago [-]
The 802.11ah offerings right now are a mess though. Mostly proprietary and just generally very buggy. I don't know of a single chip that can actually be used with up-to-date Linux. Do you? Be it Morse Micro, Newracom, Taixin or any other, they all suck in some aspect.
Hostapd people also do not seem interested in bringing in any 802.11ah support. So it's crap in that aspect as well. Drivers all fake 802.11n or the chipset offers some garbage AT-command interface and does all of the networking.
On the other hand MeshCore and Meshtastic have similarly terrible codebases as far as I've seen. At least they're somewhat usable though.
Honestly no clue why these software stacks are all this dangerously written, unstable and haven't improved in years.
KurSix 4 days ago [-]
Mesh networking is still mostly a playground for hobbyists and hacky, built-on-the-knee implementations. People love shipping a cool PoC, but as soon as the boring stuff starts - stabilization, drivers, edge cases - everyone bails to chase the next hype protocol. We’re left with mountains of half-baked C++ legacy that nobody dares to refactor because the whole house of cards would collapse iirc
walrus01 4 days ago [-]
LoRA is extensively used in Ukraine right now as a UAV control rf link to bridge serial uart from ground control system to uav. In its most narrow channel configurations at lower bps and using things like 1.2GHz tuned yage antennas it can have some very robust jamming resistance.
MiracleRabbit 4 days ago [-]
> Wifi HaLow 802.11ah
LoRa is another level. It works down to -146dBm.
802.11ah dies around -100dBm.
Still much much better than "standard" Wifi. But you are comparing two different beasts.
HNisCIS 5 days ago [-]
Eh, I've played with 802.11ah and it's very long range for the power, but way too stateful for the use case that these mesh protocols serve. If you go out of range it's several seconds to re-establish a connection. I've worked with proper mesh radios (Silvus, etc) and they work very differently.
5 days ago [-]
sealWithIt 4 days ago [-]
I think it was a good decision. I just spent a couple weeks doing experiments with meshcore/meshtastic/reticulum/... comparing them to our stealth solution and I experienced a functional core in meshcore surrounded by a lot of vibe coded slop.
In particular I did not like the shoddy documentation of the various vibe coded interfaces and how brittle the integration experience felt because of them.
KurSix 4 days ago [-]
It’s funny how a standard power grab over cash and control is being packaged as some "Holy War against AI"
Highlighting the Claude usage in the headline is a blatant move to bait the anti-AI crowd and farm sympathy points. The real issue has nothing to do with who generated the AST -whether it was meat-ware or a transformer - the issue is the brand hijacking. Stop dragging technology into this; it’s just pure legal scumbaggery
webprofusion 4 days ago [-]
The key takeaway from this is that drama loving dinosaurs live among us. Moving on.
webprofusion 4 days ago [-]
I'm ignoring the attempted trademark trickery because TLDR; blah AI is evil blah blah other stuff.
mg794613 4 days ago [-]
Lovely, another open source rugpull.
Is this the new way? Attract a lot of developers, and when you think you can sell the product , you take all their code and call it your own.
[1] https://reticulum.network/ [2] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-echo-lilygo [3] https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba
although, i’ve already done real time voice calls over 1 hop of reticulum lora on and it works pretty ok.
edit - community wiki with getting started instructions is here:
https://reticulum.miraheze.org/wiki/Welcome
Also great for position tracking, sensor data or motion detection etc.
Neat concept but so many footguns that (imo) it’s not really sustainable to try bootstrapping.
Specifically, I had tried to port the stack to Rust no-std to use on nrf52 LoRA devices to use/abuse the existing MeshCore network to deliver reticulum packets. Turned out to be a nightmare just trying to figure out if my packets were even correctly formed.
Only very very small testbeds.
https://rmap.world/
It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
Is there still a reason to do this?
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/wiki/Community-Node-L...
takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.
So you basically eliminate futzing around with the hard parts until you understand the reticulum network itself.
Basically work your way down the OSI model instead of working your way up it.
They have a decent range (15 miles or more) so depending on how rural you are, you might be able to create a line of repeaters back to a major population center.
Your point still stands though.
Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
Why not anymore? I know meshtastic has dumb routing but I thought Meshcore was much better.
I think things like this are at high risk of having perfect be the enemy of good, but I’m not exactly in my comfort zone technically.
I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.
1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.
2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.
3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".
FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.
For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.
If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.
I was getting very good signals with this one [1].
[0] http://kiwisdr.com/public/
[1] http://21959.proxy2.kiwisdr.com:8073/
I'm sorry but are you serious? That map shows 224 nodes in the world, fewer than 30 in the entire Western hemisphere. And only 24 in the world are using LoRa? Meshcore has 38,000 nodes, Meshtastic 10,000. Those two projects can actually be said to have "tons" of nodes.
It hurts your credibility. I trusted you, spent time trying to debug the map, thinking that something was wrong on my end... why am I only seeing 224 when there should be "tons", is there a filter, are these just super nodes....
So I looked into it because of what you said, but you raised expectations so much that I feel nothing but disappointment.
I was referring to the TCP/IP, I2P and yggdrasil endpoints. And regardless, "tons" was an unnecessary exaggeration.
based upon the announce stream coming through my local node, i am seeing around 14k unique identities advertising over 21k unique application endpoints (destinations) over the course of the past month or so that i’ve been tracking it.
Different countries allow unlicensed use on different frequencies. Look up which is correct for your location.
at the very least, try it. maybe it's simpler than you think
But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious.
What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents.
[1]: https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed [2]: https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-...
Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out".
Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.
Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
1. Amateur pilots
2. People late in their years getting into martials arts for the first time (will be the loudest "KIYA"s in the class and always doing the most aggressive deep bows lol)
3. Non libertarian gun nuts. Oh buddy the attention they pay to everything from how you load your gun at the range to how you've had it packed in your car.
I have specific individuals in mind for each of these categories and I say this without ill intent, I'm not trying to disparage this behavior, it just seems to be a specific kinda thing, where following the exact letter of written direction seems to be half the fun for them.
This in opposition to some other types I know who aren't having fun unless SOME rule is being broken...
It's just a word I like to use, it has a nice sound to it.
The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
That rule applies only to amateur stations (it says so right in the text!), not unlicenced individuals. What an amateur station is is defined in the beggining of the document, and yes, that requires the a duly-authroized (licenced) operator.
The last thing you want in an emergency event is some prepper with a baofeng transmitting on a repeaters frequency without a subtone set (because he's too stupid to pass an exam that 10yo kids can pass) effectively jamming it for proper emergency users. The other thing is, that chances are no one will actually hear you, especially on simplex. With tools like garmin inreach, carrying an HT with you instead of something proper and relying on that to save you in a time of need is just stupid.
Ham radio is like driving, you need experience to do it, and even some experienced people still do it badly. Trying to figure out how to drive by reading a car manual while the flood waters are rising is going to be a pretty bad experience.
Ham radios don't just appear, someone has to buy them, buying one without getting a proper licence is just stupid.... but many (especially americans) do so. There is GMRS, there is FRS, people could take those radios, try them out when not in an emergency, but nope... everyone wants that uv-5r for some reason.
Every one of those preppers should get licenced first, go to some hiking trail, some remote..ish pota park and try to do an unspotter POTA activation there... and after failing horribly, they'll rethink their emergency communications. Somehow even licenced hams (about which I assume none actually tried doing an unspotted pota from some hiking trail) support and spread the "just buy a baofeng for emergencies". In reality... they're useless in most cases. If you're somewhere remote, no one will hear you anyway, and if you're stuck at home, having something like a starlink will actually help you reach someone, much better than a radio, especially a handheld 2m/70cm one. You might get some good but useless DX with an HF one, but you won't be setting up an NVIS antenna in a snow storm.
But hey... try explaining that to preppers.
If someone had a heart attack, somewhere remote enough, that there is no cell signal, using a GMRS radio will have the same effect and range than a ham radio (i'm talking about 5W HTs here). Using something like a garmin inreach would actually get them help, but still, preppers want their baofengs, and for some reason don't want the *g models. That's why i get bothered when people promote ham radios, especially baofengs for emergencies, because they'll be useless in most cases and people who don't know that, will rely on them instead of getting a proper tool for the job. Many of those even have that in their pockets right now (some samsungs and iphone can do satellite communications already). Promoting the "you don't need a licence in emergencies" and then turning to "you'll be breaking the law anyway but who cares" mentality means that people don't learn even the basics (if they did, they'd be able to pass the exam) but still rely on those radios to get help.. and in turn, people will die because of that.
As i said before.. if you have a heart attack in the middle of nowhere, a baofeng won't get you help. If you went with gmrs/frs, you'd test it out and see the limited range and that no one is actually listening out there (unless arranged, and that person is in simplex range), if you get licenced, then you'd do the same, call out cqs into the void until you got bored, but if you do the "just buy one, you don't need licences..." (even if you do need to be licenced), people will be using that radio for the first time during an active emergency and fail in getting help with them. Stop promoting the untrue myth of getting help with a ham radio, instead offer proper tools for the job and people will actually be able to get help.
You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun.
I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out.
Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing?
At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case.
So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens.
In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
Go look at the budget documents for the tower sites and entire radio communication networks that support public safety networks (police, fire, ambulance) on a scale of somewhere the size of King County, WA. Properly engineered hilltop tower sites with well maintained generators, redundant radio links, etc. Amateurs just don't have the resources to do these things properly and are a distraction at best.
My opinion is not new or novel - the people who built the att long lines microwave network in the pre fiber optic era very rarely if ever had anything to do with ham radio. Persons concerned with actual mission critical emergency communication systems learn the hard way that amateur dilettantes just don't have the financial resources or time to do it properly.
If you want to build an emergency communications network, it's going to cost money in real equipment and paying for the man hours of full time equivalent employees to build and run it.
Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload.
A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
There are many different niches in the amateur radio hobby. Some people want to buy off the shelf radios and antennas to make contacts over the air. Some people want to experiment with their homebrew designs and see how far their signal reaches. Some people want to experiment with very low power radios. Some people (including a Nobel prize winner!) want to experiment with new digital communication protocols for amateur radio use. And yes, some people want to use amateur radio for emergency communication purposes.
Why is it so wasteful for any of these groups to do what they're doing instead of applying their skills to something "useful"? Why is it any more wasteful than participants in other hobbies? That also ignores the fact that many amateur radio operators _do_ apply themselves to "useful" things: they're electrical engineers, physicists, software engineers, educators, military or emergency personnel, etc.
It's a hobby. "Let people enjoy things". Please remember this: it's a hobby. It's right there in the name: amateur radio. We're not trying to be world-class industry-leading RF engineers.
No, not everything in the world has to be utilitarian or accomplish a purpose. But amateur radio is continually living in the past, their entire communication paradigm is often based on something akin to circuit-switched networking when the packet based networking world passed them by quite some years ago.
But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube.
Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others.
That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
There is also a fair bit of demographics at play. Many of the people writing these little applications grew up and imprinted before open source was much of a thing.
I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types.
I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump.
Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community.
And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF.
I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny.
The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
Like with roads and cars, radio spectrum is a very limited and very shared resource, and there has to be some regulation, or else some Elon Musk-type person would already take it for themselves for a commercial reason.
It's also self-policed, so that means that hams have to find the problematic entities and hope that authorities with legal power act on those reports.
The devices can also be uncertified (self-certified by a ham technically), so you can cause all sorts of havoc for many other entities, like actual emergency services (a case not long ago in US) or worse.
If you are not able, or for some reason or another don't want to get licenced, there are other ways to communicate, like mentioned meshtastic, which doesn't require a licence on ISM bands, or PMR/FRS radios (or gmrs in us, which does require a licence but you don't have to learn the radio basics for the exam).
Again, like with roads and cars, you expect others there to be mentally capable enough to pass that simple exam and follow the basic rules on the air. If not, they can get a bicycle and argue on the bicycle lane with other cyclists. And the ham exam is much cheaper and easier than a driving exam (in most developed countries at least, the driving one costs 1keur++ if you finish optimally, whereas over here, a full intro to ham course (a few weeks, usually on zoom) with a printed book and the actual exam costs <100eur, even less with a pdf instead of a book)
The problem is hams - the people who are habitually are on amateur radio.
I find them to be incredibly anti-digital, holier than thou, loud about hard-conservative positions, misogynist, racist, and more. And when Ive tried to further the art and science of radio comms, hams are some of the first to talk down what I contributed.
They are people who I dont, and dont want to associate myself with.
Ive also known others that made that assumption when I said I was a ham. Lots of people have had those experiences, and also chosen not to associate with them.
I'm sure this doesnt apply to "all Hams". It does apply to a supermajority in the USA, enough to say that I do not want to be a ham any longer. I already refused to communicate with them, nor associate with them.
I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.
>And, he’s kept that small detail a secret - that it’s all majority vibe coded.
Without any more context, I am highly suspicious of this framing.
1) Someone "taking over" the ecosystem seems like an entirely different issue. How is this possible? Does it mean he's publishing things and people want to use them?
2) Is the code bad? It sounds like they had no idea he was using AI. That seems to imply there was nothing wrong with the code as-is. Why not judge it on it's merits?
>The team didn’t feel it was our place to protest, until we recently discovered that Andy applied for the MeshCore Trademark (on the 29th March, according to filings) and didn’t tell any of us.
Taking this at face value, this is indeed hostile and bad.
But no, I'm not going to get outraged that someone is simply using Claude Code.
Anyone that has used AI at all knows this isn't how it works. AI is extremely good at producing plausible-but-wrong outputs. It's literally optimised for plausibility, which happens to coincide with correctness a lot of the time. When it doesn't you get code that seems good and is therefore very difficult to judge on its merits.
With human written code it's a lot easier to tell if it's good or not.
There are exceptions to this - usually if you have some kind of oracle like that security work that used AddressSanitizer to verify security bugs, or if you're cloning a project you can easily compare the behaviour to the original project. Most of the time you don't have that luxury though.
The vibecoder was on MeshOS, which indeed is not open source
Then you ask them to actually find a source file for the apps and they go quiet. It's wild how much it looks like open source from a casual glance.
Also, citation needed:
> With human written code it's a lot easier to tell if it's good or not
Now the trademark take over seems crazy especially given Andy hasn't contributed to the github project, only personal for profit add ons.
I do also think that the meshcore core team have "tacked on" and tried to enforce a stronger narrative with their anti ai coding bias.
Especially when they try to hide that they were using those tools in the first place
Can you elaborate on this?
I'd agree that is problematic. But that's not what the article said. The article just said he was using Claude Code a lot. It's ridiculous to equivocate those two things. That's what I have an issue with.
In that context it is quite logical to take a trademark out once the project is mature enough so you can profit off other people's work.
Considering their user base does not like the hidden vibe coded idea I don't think this is bias but a sane rationalisation.
You're assuming the thing in question - that it's just AI slop. They dont offer any insight on that - they merely say he used Claude Code a lot. It shows a real lack of understanding of AI tools to equivocate those two things.
"Sooo productive", sure, buddy, and when it breaks you have no idea why it broke and ultimately you don't know the codebase. Instructions.md containing:
``` * make no mistakes * don't hallucinate ```
Is the clear-cut evidence that we are speed running towards a technological apocalypse. Ironically, I'm in favour of it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better and people to get back to using their brains, I'm all for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty
If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing.
To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.
Can you name the game? Meshtastic has got me thinking about that kind of stuff.
There were 4 or 5 "color" teams. Each one carries a meshtastic node, and they all report to a central server back at base. The play field was roughly a square mile divided up into a grid of smaller squares. If you walk into one and it's past the cooldown time, it claims it for your team. Most squares at the end of two hours wins. The server would send out updates over meshtastic also: "Blue captures H12" "Red has 18", etc. If you were at the base station, you got to see it all play out live on a big map.
There was another one played at night which was a hide and seek game / capture the flag sort of game. It would tell the seekers some limited information about the seekers, and each side had special functions they could use. Hiders could "go invisible" or fake their location for a certain time. Seekers could call a limited number of "drone strikes" on different squares. The game ends when either the hiders are caught, or they make it to a specific target location.
Lots of possibility for that sort of thing with Meshtastic. I guess either could have run on a phone since now even rural camping areas have decent cell coverage these days, but that's not quite as impressive.
It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.
We have a pretty big meshtastic/meshcore / reticulum scene in Taiwan organized through g0v's civic defense group. It's a nontrivial issue for us when the PRC keeps cutting our cables - which is why Audrey Tang was hitting up Starlink back when they were the digital minister.
Basically we very much may need these secondary networks someday.
I really want to get plausible "Walkaway" intranet set up here with e.g. mirrored Wikipedia and whatnot, I don't know enough yet to do that though.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/G0v%E9%9B%B6%E6%99%82%E6%94%B...
Get a basestation from Mikrotik and use Chirpstack as backend.
This setup is commercially very very battlefield proven.
The closed client isn't needed anymore.
My local mesh was testing out meshcore last week, this definitely kills my interest too
https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open
You don't have to use the closed source app; there's an open-source client too, there are Blackberry-style client devices which don't require an app at all, and all the actual firmware is open source (MIT).
Worth noting that the Blackberry-style devices are also closed source and the hardware and software is way worse than Blackberry was 22 years ago.[0]
[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/#this-is-no...
I wasn't expecting the T-Deck to be anything more sophisticated than a walkie-talkie for SMS, but it's a bummer than the UI code isn't open.
The radio API and firmware is open; I have no ire for people who choose to make software closed source so that it can be monetized when there are SO many other options that in many cases supersede the functionality of the closed source option.
https://github.com/jkingsman/Remote-Terminal-for-MeshCore
It is essential to disclose it.
All over the internet people are putting up vibe coded projects and no one says that's what it is up front. They all just say "I made this" and they are more than happy to take in the adulation of people impressed that they made something with an animated pattern.
Then when they finally admit that they wrote nothing and don't know how any of it works people start to say "nothing wrong with using ai", as if using it is the same as copying it verbatim, not understanding anything and taking complete credit as if you wrote it while lying about how it was used.
Just a word of caution, claude code might look impressive if your knowledge is shallow or intermediate in a topic, but if you know what you’re doing, once you dig deeper it starts to introduce plenty of scope creeps into your code base, piling one on top of another that you won’t even recognize your own code shortly.
[1]: https://meshcore.io
[2]: https://meshcore.co.uk
But it sure seems interesting how every time I hear about someone just doing a “rewrite it all with AI“ they seem to turn out to be a giant jerk.
Maybe not the only one. I don’t know enough backstory to judge how trustworthy this post is.
But the signal to noise ratio on my little test above seems pretty good.
It's ridiculous to me that they're concerned about the trustworthiness of AI-generated code when their code quality is so low. They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3]
Last I checked, there's little validity checking in the code, so it's possible to broadcast nonsense values (like GPS coordinates outside of Earth's bounds) and the code happily accepts it.
And that's fine if they're just like a scrappy upstart doing their best, but it annoys me to be so high and mighty about their code quality when they don't invest in it.
I really want to like MeshCore but I feel like its stewardship makes it hard. The main two people I know running it are Scott Powell and Liam Cottle, both of whom are trying to build businesses on closed-source layers on top of the firmware. I don't think there's anything wrong with an open-core business model (I ran such a business myself), but it creates perverse incentives where the core maintainers try to suppress information about the open-source alternatives and push their own closed-source paid products.
Also, MeshCore's recommended broadcast settings for the US are illegal.[4] I emailed the Liam and Scott about this months ago, and they ignored me.
[0] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/925
[1] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1059
[2] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/1065
[3] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/meshcore.js/pull/11
[4] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945
First, I don't know if their interpretation of the rules is correct. For the sake of argument, I'll assume it is. More importantly, most other people in that thread seem to be going along with the idea that it is correct. This is how it reads to me:
Submitter: We're violating the rules and should make this change.
Replier 1: That change would be inconvenient in Seattle so we're not doing it.
Replier 2: It wouldn't work well in Boston, either, so it's a no-go.
Part of me wants to shake them. This isn't 'Nam. There are rules. Whatever you think about the FCC regulations, they're not voluntary, and they certainly don't have an opt-out for "it wouldn't work as well that way". To a first approximation, everyone else using the public airwaves is more or less following the law. If following the law makes your project not work as well, that's your problem. It's on you to fix your project so that it's legal to use.
I'm not one of those old hams who gets hyper cranky about this stuff, but I do understand how they come to be that way. The only reason we can use the spectrum at all is that people are mostly using it legally so that their work isn't interfering with everyone else trying to use the same public resource.
This is also a loaded question. The only specifics they've offered are that he simply used Claude Code. Um... OK? Do the tests pass? Did his changes add any security flaws? Regressions that were untested?
Agreed, but at least it's somewhat sensibly structured. AI? Good lord you'll end up with a slopaghetti mess.
> They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3]
Two people, 540 issues and 270 PRs open at the moment. Not wanting to be that guy... but do the math. The reviewer team is small as hell and after this drama (which probably kept both of them busy with BS) they'll likely be even less willing to trust others.
If you want to stand a better chance at getting your code into other people's hands, go and contact the person behind the Evo fork. IIRC he's part of Hansemesh, Germany's biggest regional MC.
I have heard indirectly multiple times now that the only two ways to get a PR of interest merged is to either gather enough people to Like the issue on Github or to join the Discord and ask.
[1] https://github.com/mattzzw/MeshCore-Evo
Also, I'm assuming we're in agreement that software should not accept invalid GPS coordinates from untrusted peers regardless of semantics about whether or not they're within Earth's bounds.
Circular coordinates wrap around, cartesian coordinates don't.
I can't read that without assuming the real intent is to deliver bombs accurately, but the startup pitching it knows that'd get bad press, and the investors all know exactly what it really means...
The main reason both Meshtastic and MeshCore have location data as a part of the protocol is because they emerged from the Ham community which has always taken its role in search and rescue seriously, and because it also appealed early on for other off-grid uses like hiking.
Wifi HaLow 802.11ah is finally out & available, sometimes at ok prices. We don't really have ad-hoc communication pioneered for wifi, but it's doable and we ought lean into it, rather than using some totally different stack, especially one that is under strict control of a single company.
What we learn doing wifi halow can directly port and improve the rest of ways we connect. That would be grand.
Hostapd people also do not seem interested in bringing in any 802.11ah support. So it's crap in that aspect as well. Drivers all fake 802.11n or the chipset offers some garbage AT-command interface and does all of the networking.
On the other hand MeshCore and Meshtastic have similarly terrible codebases as far as I've seen. At least they're somewhat usable though.
Honestly no clue why these software stacks are all this dangerously written, unstable and haven't improved in years.
LoRa is another level. It works down to -146dBm.
802.11ah dies around -100dBm.
Still much much better than "standard" Wifi. But you are comparing two different beasts.
In particular I did not like the shoddy documentation of the various vibe coded interfaces and how brittle the integration experience felt because of them.
Highlighting the Claude usage in the headline is a blatant move to bait the anti-AI crowd and farm sympathy points. The real issue has nothing to do with who generated the AST -whether it was meat-ware or a transformer - the issue is the brand hijacking. Stop dragging technology into this; it’s just pure legal scumbaggery
Is this the new way? Attract a lot of developers, and when you think you can sell the product , you take all their code and call it your own.
Has this worked out for someone so far?