Yes with the asterisk that a decent amount of the off-grid hardware hidden in trees around the country will probably never get a firmware update. Because people have either forgotten about them or can no longer reach them. It's already a big issue with orphaned nodes running outdated firmware clogging up the default LongFast channels in more densely populated areas.

Yes

It's already happened at least twice with meshtastic, first with the mqtt to internet bridge topic causing flooding and the meshrouting protocol itself being capped too low and causing chaos at big events like defcon.

What are filly mesh settings?

!meshtastic@mander.xyz

!Meshcore@feddit.org

Pretty much the only step is picking a device - do you just want a little stick for testing or making a repeating station, or would you rather have a more standalone device with a big (relatively) screen and maybe a keyboard? Do you want/need GPS? Consider how you're going to power it - pro tip, discarded "single use" vapes are a great source of small rechargeable LiPos.

Both Heltec and LilyGo are good choices with regards to reliability and compatibility. Go on their websites and get an idea of what's out there, then pick one and you'll be up and meshing the same day you receive it!

That's correct. As the bandwidth increases, the radiated power from the transmitter is reduced.

You're correct in your understanding, but one problem is that Lora isn't spread spectrum in the traditional sense(s). It's a narrow band signal that traverses over a wide band as it's method of modulation/encoding. The FCC has regulations for direct sequence spread spectrum (entire transmission is spread out) and frequency hopping spread spectrum (narrowband signal, randomly transmitted within a range). Lora is neither, using chirp spread spectrum (narrowband signal travels up and down within it's bandwidth).

The ideas as I understand them in the regulations is that a full spread transmission has lower amplitude and isn't strong enough at any frequency to interfere with other transmitters, and the pseudo random spread doesn't stay anywhere long enough to completely interfere on any one frequency. Lora isn't either, but it is low power and traverses it's bandwidth quickly, so it most closely follows the direct sequence spread spectrum method if you remove your glasses and squint.

This sharp transmission, but travelling over a wide range is what makes it able to transmit over such long distances. It has the signal to noise of Morse code, and interference tolerance of direct sequence spread spectrum.

Yes. The actual modulation itself is proprietary, but everything above that is open source.

The physical layer is proprietary, the signals it produces is not. So if you can develop a way to reproduce the signals without using or stealing their hardware you're good.

There are efforts to reverse engineer it.

totally different things. reticulum is routing, meshtastic is the transport. you don't route anything without a transport

Setting up some nodes in Barcelona this week!

Wdym? Reticulum is super promising, but it needs a path, no? I could well be misunderstanding, but Meshtastic is more like "infrastructure". You can actually send Reticulum over Meshtastic/Meshcore (though you may choke the network :/). Seems to me that even if you're excited about Reticulum, you'd still want those Meshtastic networks built out.

Speaking of Reticulum, the Reticulum Community Wiki is an excellent learning resource for those curious.

Meshtastic ya but Meshcore is definitely way more scalable.

I found it really difficult to use/understand and the mobile app is so slow.

I bet you also believe apple has the right to block people from repairing their devices.