Dave“I’m not a prepper, I just live in California and have a master’s degree in telecommunications”
Or at least that’s the short explaination I give for setting up a local cluster of LoRa nodes. The longer answer definitely gets into some prepper-light territory, but it’s what I would categorize as reasonable prepping that most of us here in California participate in between our regular earthquake “Shake Out Days” and having our earthquake kits with food and water stored in our houses. But also there’s an aspect of my background in telecommunications policy that leads me to want something to fall back on in the event of an emergency when I know that our underdeveloped cellular and wireless networks here in the US would enter a failure state.
With that said, Meshtastic is a fantastically easy and cheap option that gets to basic texting service to your existing cell phone over a fairly reasonable area. It’s also cheap enough that building out your own mesh isn’t actually cost prohibitive vs something like trying to roll your own cellular or even wifi network. Each device costs between $12-$30 depending on how many bells and whistles you want and they’re also extremely lightweight and robust which allows them to be deployed almost anywhere.
To start, I ordered a pair of ESP32 LoRa nodes to get a hang for the protocol and use. These are great starter nodes and honestly all you need to set up a decent point-to-point system. You configure them using the guide at meshtastic.org, pair them with your phone, and you’re ready to go. These are no-frills units with no GPS (good if you’re security-minded) and relatively small batteries.
After playing with these for about a week I opted to convert one into a base station by housing it in a weatherproof enclosure, improving the antenna, and adding a solar panel to provide auxiliary charging for the onboard battery. I also increased the battery size to account for cloudy days and power drain over night. This isn’t really a permanent solution since the ESP32 based nodes are more power hungry than other options but in terms of recycling what I had to get the system stood up it worked well.
This device is mainly set up as a relay node for our other devices which might run out of power or miss messages if we’re away from the home base area. I have a private group configured for these with security permissions so chat between this node and our other two is encrypted and secure. It’s mounted on a fence post, and gets pretty solid range. If I increased the height of the unit or antenna I could extend that significantly.
And speaking of that third node, I wanted something with GPS capabilities to use when hiking or mountain biking and to better test out the overall mesh performance I could get. For that I opted for a wisblock implementation consisting of a WisBlock board, RAK radio for the LoRA comms, and the GPS block. This is all housed in a 3D printed case that has plenty of room for the 3000mAh battery that provides several days of power even with GPS enabled.
The RAK WisBlock approach is more expensive than the basic Heltec or other ESP32 based options but it’s more feature-capable and extensible as a platform for other tooling. For example you can use additional modules to add atmospheric sensors and build in weather reporting to a stationary node. They’re also more efficient so are better suited to mobile or remote implementations. Eagle-eyed readers will also notice that I’m not using the switch on mine. that can be used to turn the GPS on or off to extend battery life or for other capabilities – I just haven’t wired it up yet.
Ultimately for less than $60 I was able to set up a three node Meshtastic cluster that will provide functional text messaging service for my family in the event of an emergency or natural disaster. The next thing I’d like to look at with it is the ability to push remote updates to the firmware via an IoT control plane so I don’t have to hook them up to a computer to patch them. With a larger network that would definitely be a necessity, and with as cheap and portable as they are it wouldn’t be reasonable to paint your local area by yourself or with a local group. Here in the Bay Area we have an active group (Bayme.sh) and there’s no reason you couldn’t start your own.