I think Meshtastic users will prefer max power. But there is only small part of spectrum available.
I’m not sure how many LoRa Channels required by Meshtastic to function properly.
Second question if its possible in Meshtastic to use 2 or 3 different parts of 868 spectrum with different power limits?
It would help if you would quote the sections you think are relevant.
Or at least cite the sections in the 95 page pdf.
Also, the collective ‘WE’ are not in violation, nor is the project. It is up to users to use the appropriate hardware and settings for their region when and where allowed by local laws and regulations.
To do that i need answer for my questions about number of channels and meshtastic ability to handle different part of spectrum with different power limits at the same time.
I would suggest that the power output of the radio chipset is not necessarily what you are going to get at the antenna output. Here is a measured example using a heltec board the 22dbm of the sx1262 comes closer to a real world output of 16dbm:
I am working on making this easier with the GUI but everything is adjustable including the output DB and spectrums that are used. These radios can easily break rules and it has been and will always be up to the end-user to make sure you are using the radios by your region’s laws. Some members have radio operators licenses and they can do way more than others and shouldn’t be limited because of regional regulations. LoRa is a shared spectrum so by design meshtastic can be tailored to operate within the rules of your area.
re: optionally turning off encryption
It is not well documented but this is already supported.
re:
and that results must be used to limit power of transmission in prebuild firmware.
I think eventually offering this option in the firmware is a great idea. But “must be used … to limit the transmission power in the firmware” I think overstates this project’s obligations.
Radiospectrum is shared resource, and Meshtastic should be a good neighbor.
Of course, an experienced user will be able to modify the source code and use whatever power and range his hardware allows. But the chance that he will violate the requirements of the regulator is small.
Another thing is inexperienced mass users who can only use ready-made firmware.
Current version does not limit power at EU433 and EU868 there 10mW and 25mW allowed accordingly. (don’t know about current Meshtastics duty cycle or Listen Before Talk implementation)
Then number of EU users will raise it will lead to chaos in IoT band.
Totally agreed. One thing works in our favor: Usage is currently quite low (a few thousand active users in the world).
But one thing works against us: We have a very limited # of hours that volunteers are able to contribute to this project (though we are always eager to have more ). Therefore I don’t think we are at the point where we can require those volunteers to work on anything that isn’t in their personal list of priorities.
That said, pull requests to decrease the chance that users could inadvertently abuse spectrum would be eagerly accepted and promoted.
I think a far better and more open approach would be to set sensible defaults for every region and implement a “legal range”. If the user wants to operate the device outside of this legal range, he has to actively accept a warning message like “the settings you intend to set are not legal in your region…”.
This could be implemented in the app and would prevent novice users from accidentally breaking laws.
I personally am against things that go further than this, like deliberately engineering the device or app code to dictate the user what he can and can’t do, because in the end the users who want to break the law will do it regardless of some obstacles, and it’s against the open and free approach of this project.
Is that true? Meshtastic does not distribute the finished hardware product.
There are frequencies in EU868 band where you can transmit with up to 500mW and a duty cycle of 10% i think… At least for germany. I’ll look it up.
Edit: here we go
433,050 - 434,790 MHz - SRD (Short Range Devices), ISM Band 1, overlapped by amateur radio (432,800–435,000 MHz)
Max power: 10mW
Max airtime: 100%
863 - 870 MHz (SRD-Band Europe)
Divided up in: 865 - 868 MHz Max power: 500mW, Max airtime: mobile 2,5%, stationary 10%, with restrictions: adaptive power control or similar required, bandwidth ≤ 200 kHz 869,40 - 869,65 Max power: 500mW, Max airtime 10% remaining blocks all max power: 25mW, Max airtime: 0,1-10%
The black and white consequences presented by @denis-d seem unlikely in practice. Until there is evidence that individual consumers are being prosecuted for over powering radios having sensible defaults and a short disclaimer that you need to check your local regulations is probably the lowest risk option.
Could I ask you to open a feature request for listen before send? The datasheet for the sx1276 and sx1272 has a reference to RegRssiValue which can be read at any time to return the rssi at a given channel. I’d bet that register is in the other radios as well.
How that would be used would need to be well thought out but we should at least document that the information is available.
Here’s a sample of checking if the channel is free.
LoRa can go much much further than this it’s more limited by the curvature of the earth, the record was over 700km at only 25mw output using weather balloons.
I got over 70km line of site with 2x t-beams running meshtastic and some antenna’s that turned out to be for 900mhz instead of 868mhz that I was testing with.
But that doesn’t mean they will interfere at that range, radio waves don’t stop at a distance, they just get weaker and LoRa is very good at decoding very weak radio waves even below the noise floor.
450 miles is the record I know of for LoRa and the duty cycle is about the only thing I know of that can cause the most interruption so there are to many different rules for different areas for us to make them default for any one person’s convenience. It is very much a project that requires the user to learn, it is not a pick-up-and-go product for resell. Meshtastic can be applied to so many different devices that it needs to be flexible and the end-user finishes the product IMO. I feel like posts like these are wanting it to be default compliant so they can use it a product they want to sell and when it comes to that, why should the group do the heavy compliance lifting for you? Meshtastic has the goal of being able to give people the power to make their own networks, Meshtastic is not a baseline you can build a product you want to sell off of and I don’t think it ever should be, just my 2 cents
That was a very specific situation. And just because the radios where able to transmit meaningful information over such a range does not mean they where interfering with others devices ability to communicate using the same frequency over the same area. A big part of the LORA ‘magic’ is the way it encodes and spreads information over the RF band to be resistant to interference and coexist with other transmissions. This is NOT AM or FM radio where strong transmitters effectively prevent other uses of the frequency in a given area.
Also, if you did some research regarding this project and the community around it you would see that vast majority of regular contributors to the project, especially in discussions, are advocating staying within regulatory frameworks. We get new people weekly asking to do something that is likely outside of established limits for their region and do our best to advise them to stay within limits and raise awareness of others that use these radio frequency allocations.
They way you (@denis-d ) have gone about this (to me @Spor7biker) seems like there are some assumptions that have been made, and broad pronouncements not backed by specific information that frankly come across as accursing us of doing wrong, being ignorant, and not caring. To my mind this is reaffirmed by the examples you have provided, outside of context, to try and reinforce the points you are making.
I’m not a lawyer, but I skimmed through the doc you linked “ Final draft ETSI EN 300 220-1 V2.4.1 “ and can’t find anything there that indicates that the Meshtastic Software violates any rules in that document. The cover page states that the guide applies in the EU to :
”Radio equipment to be used in the 25 MHz to 1 000 MHz frequency range…”
In our case, we are one of many software applications that can be loaded onto off the shelf development kits. If the user uses the software in violation of local regulations, that is the responsibility of the user.
There are no self published hardware designs for devices or equipment in our repository. We are a group of passionate volunteers who are contributing what interests us using the few hours we are able to share with this community.
That said, this is an open source application and we welcome anyone to contribute to make this even better. The spirit of this thread is a good one, it highlights a possible improvement to what we have built. If you or anyone would like to contribute effort to make Meshtastic even better, the volunteers here will gladly help the best we can.
In the short term, I hope we can agree that the next step is to submit a feature request in GitHub to make sure we don’t lose track of this excellent conversation as something to consider in our backlog. Only request is to make the request very specific rather than a broad stroke. Want to propose changes to power levels for a specific region? Sure, what would it be and why? Change to frequencies? Sure, what would that look like and why?
I really appreciate the passion you bring to this.
). Therefore I don’t think we are at the point where we can require those volunteers to work on anything that isn’t in their personal list of priorities.
