Tag: radios

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Node Down!

Wow, I love how I posted one thing about Meshtastic and then never did again. Well, I did, just not here… but over on Mastodon.

Anyway, for all of 2025 and up until this week in April 2026 my solar Meshtastic node was dutifully passing packets on the mesh. And the mesh has been growing! There are a ton more nodes east of here (between Tosa and Milwaukee) and I’m happy to see the growth.

The node was put up poorly and uh, “temporary” which turned into semi-permanent. I had a plan to mount it higher, so maybe now is the time to do that… and to secure things a bit better. It’s janky, for sure, but I’m surprised that it worked just fine like this for over a year. The battery never died and was enough to sustain power during the cloudy days.

So dc06 is down for a bit, but will return, hopefully higher, and maybe cleaned up a bit. I should also update the firmware while it’s down.

Here’s to the Mesh!

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Meshtastic Begin

What is Meshtastic? “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”… It’s a system of small Long Range (LoRa) radios that form a mesh network to provide text communications. It allows texting from your phone (or computer) even without the grid. If the power is out, all your computers are offline, the cellular networks are all down… you can still communicate. Meshtastic does not require the Internet, the cell networks, or any other grid-based things. (Also, Read the Docs!)

The details of how it technically works are explained very well by Austin Mesh: Can you explain it like I’m five years old?

So my old pal Matt got me interested in this because we live close enough that we should be able to use it between our houses. We haven’t yet, but we’re still working towards that. There do not seem to be other nodes in the area, which is crucial to a mesh network…

So in the meantime as we experiment and figure things out and test antennas and different hardware, there is research and reading and learning to be done. And testing, and building solar-powered nodes that can live 25 feet up and there is 3D printing and messing around with electronics, and… it’s been a nice distraction that we hope will be useful someday when others join us.

So for now, I am dropping this post here to say we are here, join us. If you’re in Milwaukee or Wauwatosa or close by or in the Greater Milwaukee Area, let me know. There is also a Meshconsin group, and a map of nodes (with many missing of course) and a Discord server.

And in future posts I’ll explain a bit more about the photos and screenshots in this post, so Stay Tuned!

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Radio BarCamp

At BarCampMilwaukee2 we had FRS radios, and I fear we had way too much fun with them, I mean, in addition to actually using them for their intended purpose, to communicate effectively within the space we had available to us.

Last year I had thought that FRS radios would come in handy as an ad-hoc public address system. Well, we had a real PA this year, so we used the radios as needed, and for finding each other, and for screwing around. Actually, they were quite useful, as we were in a building with doors that were occasionally locked and you often needed someone to let you in, or when you just had to know where Ashe was.

Come In BarCamp

While out on the Photo Walk session (aka mil[photo]waukee) and scaling the roof of a certain fortress, we were able to alert Gabe that he should come outside and wave to us.

Hey Gabe!

Yay for radios and geeks who are nerds when it comes to using them. I even hear that Gabe plans to return my radio at the next Web414 Meeting…

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BarCamp Public Address System

One of the issues we had at BarCampMilwaukee is that we did not have an easy way to immediately notify people of things.

This problem may be unique to the space we were in (Bucketworks) which was large (huge actually) and had no intercom or PA system, at least none that we knew of.

FRS Radios Things like letting everyone know when sessions were starting or when lunch arrived, or even just trying to find someone in Bucketworks, would have been easier with an intercom system. We could have done something as simple as put an FRS radio in each session room to alert people as to what was going on. (Sadly, I had three radios with me, but didn’t think of it at the time.) I know at least a few times I had to stop sessions from running over their time (only because the space was needed by others) or had to let people know that the session would need to end in 2 minutes.

I’m really not trying to be a control freak. I think if Bucketworks had an intercom or PA system, it would have made a few things easier, that’s all. Just an idea for future BarCamps…

(Mike and I discussed this a bit yesterday, he mentions it as well.)