Meshtastic uses open source hardware, right? Does that mean it’s possible to build radio receivers by ordering the parts and assembling them yourself, Ikea style? If yes, then how can I go about doing this? I am in Canada if that is relevant

  • a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.caOP
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    20 hours ago

    it uses LoRa which is proprietary

    What is LoRa exactly? I thought it was just a range of radio frequencies

    • sobchak@programming.dev
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      17 hours ago

      I believe it’s some kind of digital spread-spectrum protocol that’s able to still function when noise is more than the signal. You can use the same ~900mhz signal, which is nice because its penetration characteristics, but LoRa pushes it a little more than would normally be possible with analog.

      Edit: Did a little searching and there are open standards that do similar things such as Wi-SUN (802.15.4g), and MIoTy (ETSI TS 103 357), and Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) (though with much less range).

      Edit2: IDK how much the LoRa license fee is, but to sell in the US, all “intentional radiators” need at least self-certification. I’ve ran into the problem before in a startup I worked at; my bosses thought it was safer to go with an all-in-one module for BLE, that was supposedly already certified, so that the certification for our board was very likely to pass on the first try (and it did).

      • a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.caOP
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        16 hours ago

        I believe it’s some kind of digital spread-spectrum protocol that’s able to still function when noise is more than the signal.

        Interesting, thanks for the info

        Did a little searching and there are open standards that do similar things such as Wi-SUN (802.15.4g), and MIoTy (ETSI TS 103 357), and Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) (though with much less range).

        Would this still work with meshtastic?

        • sobchak@programming.dev
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          37 minutes ago

          No, someone would have to create a new mesh project. I suppose Reticulum could be used on those, since it’s transport agnostic.