Meshtastic information

A young ham Benjiman, KO6CNT, recently brought it to my attention that Meshtastic is becoming popular among some of the new hams.  It’s economical, technical enough to keep their interest but not overwhelming, and allows for engaging with other hams.  Benjiman was curious to see what kind of Meshtastic contacts could be made if a skydiver were to jump with a Meshtastic node.  Enough said!  A small Meshtastic node will be part of each jump.

Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure.  This project is 100% community driven and open source!  You can learn more about Meshtastic at Meshtastic.org.

For those of you that have a Meshtastic node and want to see If you can make a contact, you’ll need to make the following modification to your node configuration. 

Primary Channel: “PM”

User Preset: Medium Range-Fast

Default encryption

Keep in mind that line of sight will be 10,000 feet above Byron CA.

For this test a contact will simply be the fact that the you received a signal from the PM node.  The skydivers will not have the time to send texts as they will be making radio QSO’s.  We have no idea how this will turn out, but then that’s what it’s all about.

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