Meshtastic is encrypted.

Encrypted digital transmission over Lora is legal in the US.

No ham license required. Much better range per watt. Slower. More modern protocol.

Hi! I'm one of the devs. If you have questions you might like our (friendly/helpful) forum: meshtastic.discourse.group.

we talked about it in the early but there were some fundamental technological limitations that made it seem like not a good fit. At this point I think meshtastic is more feature complete and has lots of areas not serviced by disaster radio (ie. python API, ports to many different types of lora boards, extremely good battery life).

I think the only feature we miss wrt disaster radio is dual radio support and full DSR.

yep - I'm one of the meshtastic devs and that was our thought as well.

* use off the shelf hardware, so user can just buy a finished device from China * make it cheap * Make something useful for people in general (without disaster) - then they will have it when the disaster happens.

One of the paper authors here and the one mainly responsible for the rf95modem firmware.

The idea was not only to provide another msg app but a platform that can easily be used for different applications. One use-case in the paper is the chat app, the dtn part is not directly connected to the chat app but also uses the LoRa modem.

The modem firmware (initially developed in 2017/2018) is even more general purpose and is currently used in many different ways in different projects and prototypes. The main selling point is that one can easily connect cheap LoRa hardware to smartphones and desktop computers without microcontroller programming or providing specific device drivers. Thus, the same modem can be used for messaging as well as environmental monitoring or other IoT applications without the need to reprogram the LoRa modules.

sure! either chat on our gitter chat (link at www.meshtastic.org) or send me an email at kevinh@geeksville.com.

we are careful to keep the esp clock-gated almost all the time (esp calls this light-sleep), in that mode the power draw of the ESP is on 1.5mA. When the radio (or button press) receives a packet it wakes the main CPU, which then services everything (turning on bluetooth as needed) and then goes back to sleep. If you are curious for more details we have a power consumptions spreadsheet in our docs.

current battery life is about 3 days and will soon be eight days. See our power calculations spreadsheet, but with with scheduled broadcast intervals (because we have GPS time) it is fairly feasible to reach 30 days between charging.

I'm also a (retired, but formerly very active) paraglider and that was a big motivator for me.