It’s only been about 3 weeks of testing but so far I am seeing the units with a 3500MA Samsung 18655 battery lasting only 3 days before getting down to 20% or so. I have one unit up high on top of my shed with a solar panel that is waterproof with a built in 5V usb port plugged in to the unit and even with a little snow and cloudy days it keeps it charged (the board is in a weather proof container). We had one night of 7F and had no issues as well as most winter nights here dipping to the 20’s and upper teens. Just sharing my short real world experience 
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I have the same idea. However, I’m not sure how it’ll par with radios in terms of reach if, for example, the person you’re trying to locate is underneath a pile of rubble or in the woods.
In over 50 years of diving, only twice have I said to myself “Huh? Where’s the boat?” when I surfaced from a dive. My daughter was with me on the second occasion**.
Those two dives do tend to linger in my mind.
Now, if we are anywhere sporty we all dive with an ACR Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) in a machined delrin container good to 60m.
But pressing the button on an ELT is a pretty big trigger to pull (NOAA, all-assets, life-or-death alert) in a situation where a local gps position would be more appropriate.
So I guess I’m watching and waiting for an inexpensive device that I can hoist on a 2m safety sausage and transmit a fix to its mate on the dive boat. Bonus points for a little direction arrow on the boat’s display. No phone needed.
**Carry a bandana. It’s better than wearing a flipper as a hat.
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I know this is an old thread but I’ve just bought several meshtastic radios for a similar use. But rather than track the sheep, the radio would go on the collar of the Livestock Guardian Dog and would trigger an automatic message if it detects it barking. Working on a filter to be more selective about the kind of bark as LGDs tend to bark at everything.
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I believe I have the solution for you and your dive buddies. How about a directional gps locator that can give you distance and direction back to the boat? And or vice versa, the boat could also use the same device to locate one or all divers. Operates via Lora transceiver with gps, all stand alone.
I’ve built some with several units and they work very well in open areas. I’d be interested to do some testing on the water to see what effects on the range would be with water being in the mix.
Ballpark is seawater will attenuate our ~900mhz by about 20db per meter. That means with Lora, you’ll get 8-10m.
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The device wouldn’t be used under the water. It would be elevated about 2M above the surface on a safety sausage aka surface marker buoy. If the boat’s matching device is also is also 2m above the surface I’d expect a range of many km.
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Right, that was what I had in mind for you in regards to the marker buoy. I believe it’ll be fine, especially when one unit’s antenna is hoisted on a mast on the boat itself. That would achieve greater LOS.
@Mugwump what would you say is the furthest you’ve found yourself from the boat in both of those occasions?
You have to watch for multipath fading off the surface of the water. I worked on a seismic survey system where there was a grid of bouys all with a radio and an antenna on the top. The nulls created from reflections off the water were huge. We had to switch to circular polarized antennas to mitigate the problem.
That makes sense, I’ve heard of this happening. Easy enough to solve with circular antenna’s
Yikes. Fade margins and evaporation ducts and signal reflection/refraction. I see what you mean.
Garmin just released their new off-road navigation (700 , and again a device with the big Mini USB connector :smiley: ) with MARS radio (US only) with location tracking up to 20 devices. Due their radio choice it is an useless device for rest of the world. + they released a crazy expensive (500 ) “PowerSwitch” - basically just a 6 channel wireless (Bluetooth, haven’t find FCC approval yet) relay
This is exactly something what I would like to have - a rugged tablet / phone with a mapping app and Meshtastic LoRa “modem” for the location tracking and messaging. Could be handy for @thorolfur as well.
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btw - one of the reasons I’m eager for someone to ship a nrf52840 mass market board is that there is an ANT+ profile for “location provider” - which I’d love meshtastic to implement. Which would allow meshtastic to seamlessly provide location display/sharing on any garmin device (especially for bike computers)
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Hope you could add dark mode. This should help a lot in lowering battery drain to android devices especially considering the use case scenario of outdoors where there are no outlets.
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Have you ever seen a device that supports that profile? - their Astro devices are sensors and F3, instinct, Montana 7xx are displays.
Anyway, there are more interesting profiles, like “Tracker” (this is the “location provider” ) for tracking assets (their dog tracker uses it, max 20 dogs/assets), “Environment” for tracking sensor data (garmin devices will support only temperature), theoretically “Geocache” for sharing messages (supported only on hiking devices) and maybe “Di2” (or “Remote”) profile for remote control / remote panic button like this one Kommander Review: Zwift Control For Your Handlebars | DC Rainmaker
Just checking my garmin devices and it looks like that the best choice is to “emulate” inReach device (there is no special profile, probably it just uses a combination of mentioned profiles). It can share your location, enable livetracking, iniciate SOS, send/receive predefined messages or you can write your own one (at least on Edge and handhelds). - we need it!!!
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Yea, but garmin livetrack and messaging works only through their app - I have Edge 1030+ and it is pretty limited. Some devices support ANT+ Tracking profile, but unfortunately Edge is not… …maybe with inReach, but the profile is not open. Somebody with a inReach device could sniff the packets (for example based on Keith’s DI2 Capture video).
To the tracking and best form factor ever is Garmin’s Alpha 200i - if TTGO is looking for inspirations 
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Hi, my name is Jean-Louis living in RSA, i have 2 T beam 433Mhz, i am also on my way to experiment with my wife cows i am living in a rural place, i am also Ham radio with callsign ZSAAG, so my idea is similar, ta attach one with a collar and a small solar panel. So i am also interested in your experiences …
Jean-Louis
Hello fellow Agent! (?)
Edit (I was super tired & forgot to add the rest, i was just excited to see a mention of ingress in the wild):
Could see these being super useful at anomalys, so you’re not constantly swapping back & forth to check telegram/slack/discord/whatever your team uses, and you can see where your teammates are, too.
My use is more for staying in touch with my wife, we’re looking at buying property with abysmal cell service. Pop up a few repeater nodes, and i can still “talk” to her. She’s pretty resistant to my advances when it comes to radio (GMRS), which could be easier to implement. We also like to go places (camping, hiking, national parks) with no service, like the annual family trip to camp in Yosemite. It can be “interesting” coordinating family meals, group hikes, safety checkins, etc. Like i said, walkie talkies are a fine resource, but convincing the family to use them is almost impossible. Plus, some of our hikes are 15mi out-and back day trips up the mountains; even with a repeater, we’re not reaching back to base camp (and even the small retevis repeaters are weight i dont want to carry, especially figuring in a power supply). I can drop a few solar repeater nodes along the way and pick them up on the way back down, and not worry nearly as much about equipment loss/weight/etc.
Also thinking about my friends with younger kids; something like the TDeck would allow them to talk to their parents without necessarily having to buy a phone & add a line. The kids can go be kids in the neighborhood, chat back if needed, still be able to keep tabs on their rough location, and not worry about loosing/breaking a $900 phone (I’m still rough on phones, i think i broke like 9 flip phones in 2 or 3 years when I was younger…my S21 Ultra is currently in pieces after i took a beautiful, athletic faceplant 3 weeks ago that i dont want to pay to replace & the insurance is fighting me on) that may or may not have service. General consensus with my group of friends & family is to not be giving kids free acess to 99.999% of the internet, too many creeps doing unspeakable things. It was bad 15 years ago; it’s so much worse now…
Digression/soapbox aside, my interest is mostly interfamily communication in spotty/no cell service areas.
Is you’re just going to be camping a week, I don’t think you need a solar kit. I just ran a nf-series on a single 18650 battery (I highly recommend buying Japanese made, the China made they always over promise and way-under deliver) and it lasted me 17 days on a single charge. Granted, they was no network traffic. But even at moderate, say in a camping situation for check-ins, I think you’d get a week out of it. If you installed double 18650’s you’d obviously get along more. Just a thought so you don’t over complicate temporary trips.
For you and your wife, a could well -spaced solar repeaters, mounted high up for good line of sight, as well as one at home and one in each vehicle would probably work well.
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Like almost everywhere else on Earth, ‘natural’ disasters are happening every other week.
Our recent experience in Eastern Australia is ‘unprecedented’ floods and fires.
As is now well-known, the privatised telcos aren’t much interested in the extra costs of redundancy and multiple backhaul. Our initiative to introduce communities to Citizen’s Band radio is coming along gangbusters.
Talking to each other is fine, but Meshtastic adds that important element of persistent message display, location-aware, multiple (secure) channels.
IMHO, we would do well to extend our sensing of environmental conditions and telemetry.
The event, temp, humidity, baro, air qual telemetry are great, but we’re wanting to relay rainfall and stream height data. WeeWX can ingest these 433MHz wireless sensors, and Direwolf can, potentially, relay that to a KISS ‘TNC’. Current experimentation is with LORA-APRS. richonguzman (Ricardo Guzman (Richonguzman)) · GitHub which is the nicest implementation I’ve found so far. Stitching it all together is my work in progress.
Other sensors of interest produce analogue outputs. There are a number of ADC pinouts on the modules. A flexible way to name and pass these through the Mesh would be very welcome.
73
Greg
VK2GTH
-strong text
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