Reticulum - the new offgrid network
Last year it was about Meshtastic and LoRa devices running on Heltec v3 devices.
This year, it's all about the Rectum[sic] : https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum
So, what is it? Well, it's an alternative protocol for sending low-bandwidth data over RF (radio frequencies). "so what?"
Well, today you are spoilt by using 4G/5G (3G was turned off recently) where you have high bandwidth available to send voice, images and text information.
What if you don't have access to the cell-towers? what if someone switches it off, for whatever reason.
Well, that was what Meshtastic was going to help with & it's mighty fine at doing that - I'm suggesting that you run both these options in parallel. "Why?"
Well, they serve slightly different purposes.
Meshtastic is raw, the minimum, nothing fancy. It is a black screen with green text & lines. It communicates over low-bandwidth and the battery life is long because of this.
Reticulum, see, I have trouble spelling that without resorting to a Bart Simpson brain calling Mo's tavern, anyway, Reticulum does the same thing, EXCEPT it now lets you split up the data, whatever data it is and transmit it over very low-bandwidth.
So, you can now sending images / photos (okay, don't expect 50mega-pixel quality here) and it also sends recorded voice snippet messages.
"what's the wow! there then?"
10k networks. you are sending this data from one RNode to another RNode over Radio Frequencies, over very low-bandwidth.
Scenario:
Comms are down. You are split up from someone else. The someone else is in need for assistance to help them navigate their way from where they are to where you are. You are somewhere "safe", they are not. Now, you can send normal text info back and forth, but sometimes, being able to send an "image" speaks volumes, also sometimes, thumbing a looooooong text message is just simpler & easier to say the 10 seconds worth of words rather than the 1000 text characters.
In that scenario, Reticulum comes into it's own. (oh dear god, don't go there)
Do it, or don't, I really don't care. However, I will. I have quite a few "extra" hardware devices that can run this software, so I'll take it through it's paces.
Andy does a nice walk through here, again, unbiased, just investigating options:
https://github.com/markqvist/RNode_Firmware
p.s. how big a f--ing hint do you need?! - GO AND GET SOME DEVICES & INSTALL THIS STUFF - you have about 12-18months, go on, get clicking, get "prepping" :-)
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