Mine is on a map, but in a radius of around 10 miles. Close enough to let people know I'm here, but not accurate enough to easily track me down.

That said, if someone wanted to hunt me down, they certainly could triangulate me pretty quickly.

Perhaps where you live.

Internet 101: Laws aren't the same everywhere.

Edit: My point wasn't specifically about amateur radio (I'm also one) nor where I live, but about the old-as-the-internet habit of people scoffing about what is and isn't legal without even knowing where the person they're replying to lives.

On the radio front, numerous countries require licences to legally listen to public broadcast radio (Switzerland, Slovenia and Montenegro are examples). If your handy dandy Baofeng UV5 can pick up broadcast FM radio frequencies, in such countries it will fall under licencing requirements even if you never transmit.

Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

I don't know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I've wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.

I'd be interested in reading a debate thread on Lemmy about this.

What the pros and cons to different communication methods are following a disaster that neutralizes mainstream methods of communication.

Benn Jordan just did a video on Meshtastic and other decentralized tech, so I'm inclined to believe in mesh technology. But I'm also curious about the high frequency stuff you mention

The four repeaters in my area are run by one club. They do the Field Day exercise every year and from what I remember they run them around 150w per repeater. A small jenny could run those fuckers on 15gal a day fairly easily. In a huge emergency, though, you can relay morse on just 5w through 5 or less relaying techs to most of the world without repeaters at all. (1 if you're lucky, but I'm being fair to real life interference).

Yeah... if I am trying to reach people tens of miles away during The Apocalypse, I am already dead.

Anyone who is within range to be helpful (or... not) would generally be within signal range of a handheld.

What about more extreme cases, say Castaway (movie) type situation. Stranded on an island in middle of nowhere.

But conveniently, one of the packages has a functional 2m battery powered radio and a Yagi too. There's no one you can make contact with, except... the ISS.
What if the ISS was the only station you could contact?
"Hello International Space Station, I am stranded on an island after a plane crash. Can you help?"

They sell 2 helteks so you can play around with them for about 50$. Used to be around 30. I have a couple, they do decently well.

Yes. For true emergency/disaster relief, that is the baseline. I doubt most of the meshtastic repeaters will survive a real storm and you can bet people will be spamming/attacking longfast from the comfort of their homes a county or three over. And there is no good way to communicate proper regional channels ahead of time.

But not every internet outage is a disaster. I live in a region where it is not uncommon for construction crews to cut the fiber line and take out all traffic for the county... sometimes multiple times a month... And I can speak from experience that having a mesh network with locals is incredibly useful for "Yes, it is all of us. And Verizon/Tmobile/Spring is also out" as well as "If you go to the park on 5th and MLK you have line of sight to a working cell tower". And even just "So... I got all of Frasier on my Plex if anyone wants to hang out for a few hours".

If you whip out your emergency HAM radios (without a license) during that? You can bet ALL the narcs are gonna tattle on you because "you weren't prepared".

But even during the prelude to a disaster it can be an issue. We also have wildfires in the region and get a pretty big scare maybe once a decade. Last time we were in a state of "be ready to evacuate at a moment's notice" for the better part of a week. And just a bit of gossip that "today is going to be the day" was enough to trigger panic and clog up cell service faster than you can say "9-11". We even got an emergency push telling us that there were no planned evacuation orders for the day and to go about normal activities.

If you are someone frantically trying to figure out where the school took your kids? Yeah, you have an emergency. If you are someone who doesn't have a strong support network trying to figure out what is even going on? The narcs are gonna whinge at you. But, like I said, it is very useful to coordinate your evac with that support network. You can plan ahead of time to try to all get hotels/campsites in the town a few hours North. Then you drive through the hell of the evac until you get a few cell towers away, pull over, and use an app to book a hotel/campsite. But if all the people with families have to go South to pick up their kids from the school drop off site? You can only communicate when you are all an hour or three away from town and... ain't nobody going back through that traffic snarl.

Hopefully it ends up being a false alarm and you come back a week or two later to some smoke damage (that everyone TOTALLY fixes...) and not much else. But it's the difference between a week or two where you are able to hang out with your friends and have some degree of normalcy versus a week or two isolated and worried that you are going to lose everything.

And that is where mesh networks thrive. I am not talking about "I have a repeater in my garden" (which I should get on...). Stuff like the t-deck is what is actually useful. Plug it in, turn it on, and the pseudo-blackberries mesh with each other well enough for coordinating because enough people in town are doing the exact same thing.

One thing that people trying to make Meshtastic/Meshpro/whatever work might want to try:

odds are that your town/community have a social media system that is generally used to discuss events and the like (probably facebook, sometimes reddit). Make a post on there basically providing a link to a "getting started" guide and the credentials/key for the local mesh.

And, most importantly: Schedule an event (maybe every other month or once a quarter) where everyone with a device should turn theirs on and either be near a window or stand outside. That is a great way to rapidly detect all the temporary nodes that might only exist during a "not emergency" and for people to debug all the messes because meshtastic is a cluster.

I think the point is to keep in contact with friends and family. Maybe it would be used to blast news or alerts in a time of war idk yet, I just ordered some radios a few days ago and I am waiting to get started with it.

Check out the Quickstart: https://rootaccess.org/wiki/Meshtastic/

There are others but this is from a local makerspace and I have personally done this setup. It works well, as long as there is a node in a high place.

Honestly though its a hobby not something that can be relied on unless your whole community gets together. Hope you have fun!

Heck yeah get on the map. My area sees new repeaters weekly. If you build it they will come and it sounds like you know what to do.

https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map

Tree?

I'm not exactly standing behind it - just saying what I've read. I'm confident nuclear plants are after 9/11. Anything else is probably hit or miss, including petro/gas pipelines, coal, and generating plants specifically. Plus if a bad actor (likely state sanctioned) decides to, they can get through air gaps with spies/traitors/unwitting idiots with a simple USB drive. After air gapped uranium processing centrifuges were wrecked with an errant USB drive, I would expect all systems to disable or remove USB drive connectivity, but I'm sure that's inconsistent... at best.