How to get started with Reticulum and RNode

[@detaart]

There's a reason this hasn't been done before on lora ... The duty cycle and channel utilization will go through the roof. Especially with the duty cycle limitations in place in europe, this is a non-starter. You've essentially used up your airtime for an hour by sending an image and that voice clip. Even without those duty cycle limitations in place, any node that can hear you transmitting is effectively blocked while you are sending an image, file or audio clip. This cannot scale. Now imagine a router or repeater ... it takes 2-3 people sending an image or whatnot to essentially bring the service down. Built-in denial of service.

[@oggaBugga]

Yeah, it seems to be aimed more at users in areas that need to skirt around local law enforcement, rather than for large groups just having a chin wag.

[@HotMicSystems]

This is assuming all connections are over LoRa. You can change your transport(repeater) settings to not forward attachments or limit message size. Good points though, however this is not a LoRa only network. Also it does not utilize flood routing.

[@rfnexusyt]

It can and does scale. Here in North America, there are no duty limits on 915 MHz. Not every node in a Reticulum network (whether it be running over LoRa, TCP, packet radio, etc) is a repeater as in the case of Meshtastic. Reticulum uses table based routing with destinations rather than channels and flood routing in the case of Meshtastic.

[@detaart]

@@rfnexusyt No, it cannot scale, even without duty cycle limitations. All you have to do to take down a local mesh is send people a bunch of pictures. Built-in denial of service. They should disable the sending of files over radio interfaces, whether it is lora or packet.

[@steveparkes]

Glad to see the Heltec V3 firmware is out now. I think I'll pop back over to Reticulum and take a look again.

[@Trekeyus]

Duty cycle is important especially on the ism bands

[@tzrrsdave]

Pmr has been great this week, Birmingham, Liverpool and southend on my 12 inch dipole from st Ives Cambridge

[@andykirby]

Yep there's been an amazing lift on 😁

[@GUVWAF]

You are transmitting at 22dBm and doing image/voice transfer on a frequency that only allows for 14dBm and has a 1% transmit duty cycle (36 seconds per hour)…

[@BPTtech]

Snitch

[@GUVWAF]

The rules are there for a reason. It’s pretty selfish to use shared spectrum like this, and recommending your KZbin audience to do the same is especially bad.

[@andykirby]

It's 27dbm and 10% duty cycle in UK on 867.500Mhz (IR2030)

[@GUVWAF]

@@andykirby Only when you apply Adaptive Power Control (APC). Otherwise it's 14dBm and 1%.

[@andykirby]

APC or "other" mitigation techniques.

[@PTbyNIGHTEvents]

Does TAK run over this?

[@xSikks]

This is quite different than Meshtastic. It's more capable as far as types of data that you can transmit and receive but is less user-friendly and nowhere near as polished. But it is a completely different animal. Meshtastic takes longer on Longfast to send a 200 character text, and for a node to receive than this took to send an ENTIRE article on the quantum teleportation of photons and for the other node to recieve it. With that said, I still prefer Meshtastic.

[@JudeMakes]

Next video you got to explain how this effects meshtastic and how using this and sending pics and other things will take a lot more bandwidth and if their is a lot of people it will not work as well as meshtastic. Would love to see the pros and cons of meshtastic vs reti

[@andykirby]

We are using a different frequency here to meshtastic so it won't affect it at all 😁

[@frustratedalien666]

@@andykirby That isn't entirely accurate. If you use Reticulum over LoRa in North America, for example, you are going to be using 915 MHz. Now, you can choose TCP or Packet Radio interface, in which case the communication wouldn't be over LoRa, and that is definitely an option

[@TheAtomicZombie10]

​@@frustratedalien666there's about 100 250khz wide frequency slots in the US, I'm sure you can find a clear one, and multiple Rnodes can be used together to give more capacity.

[@nopenope9416]

@@andykirby Do you see this supplanting meshtastic?

[@WRJK988]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="480">8:00</a> no antenna? But beyond that, will you be going over the Windows version? Will it work on ATAK? And Ihad a few other questions, but can't remember. Great video and I'm VERY excited about this! Oh yea, does it have the mapping and GPS like Meshtastic?

[@andykirby]

At 8:00 there's no transmitter Enabled so no need to worry.😉 I'll go over the other platforms yes. You can do GPS and mapping as well.

[@mre9593]

am I the only one who started singing "Jenny" when Andy entered his UK frequency? <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="835">13:55</a>

[@paulladdie1026]

Is this more performant than Mestastic, or something else? Does it run at 868 MHz?

[@oggaBugga]

Not really. It just uses all the available bandwidth ( when sending photos / voice ). LoRa is not designed to handle that, one or two people sending a photo over a LoRa mesh will deny service to everyone else.

[@TheAtomicZombie10]

​@@oggaBugganot true

[@marian2k210]

Pros and cons to Meshtastic lora?

[@mrw1160]

Meshtastic has aes256 encryption, text only no voice no file sending

[@mrw1160]

I'm not sure if Reticulum encrypts and it can do audio

[@TheAtomicZombie10]

​@@mrw1160all Reticulum traffic is encrypted

[@thepinkunicorn6]

​@@mrw1160 Reticulum is just the communication protocol, think of it as an alternative to ip/tcp. The protocol relies on the crytography of the packets being encrypted to locate and communicate with other devices on the mesh, and the messaging application uses another protocol on top of reticulum called LXMF.

[@manicminer-o3j]

@@mrw1160 Andy stated this is encrypted.

[@masondawson4061]

That's really cool! I don't have any V3's with me but I do have a couple of T-Decks. If I were to flash them could they be used as standalone devices (like with Meshtastic) to message back and forth, or is it the same as your V3 demonstration?

[@HotMicSystems]

See the community edition RNode firmware. The t-deck and t-ech are not officially supported

[@ChristieNel]

Does this stack implement proper long distance mesh routing? Something better than just message forwarding?

[@andykirby]

Yes watch this. streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/relive/837

[@ChristieNel]

@andykirby Thank you! From your video it's not clear how Reticulum Transport is different from regular meshing. Hopefully this link will elaborate.

[@terrysobkowich2084]

Well at least both systems use the same hardware so people can repurpose

[@elir970]

awesome .. lets go, look what drones did

[@x81reaper]

PLEASE which firmware must i choose for the heltec t114 ?

[@LiamCottle]

T114 firmware is still in progress. It works, but I have some issues with the display update speed, so it's not available in the official firmware yet. I have some commits on my liamcottle/RNode_Firmware repo on the T114 branch.

[@Silversqueeze2025]

Is this better than meshtastic

[@bigmouthstrikesagain4056]

Cellsol is also an interesting project

[@ChristieNel]

I've implemented files over Meshtastic and now it feels kind of redundant.

[@andykirby]

Did you? Can you link your project?

[@ChristieNel]

@@andykirby It's to update firmware simultaneously on multiple remote nodes. I need this to develop and test my routing algorithm. It's very custom and low level, unfortunately. I have spoken with the Meshtastic devs about implementing it native, but didn't get much interest or support. I suspect they have enough on their plate.

[@LiamCottle]

@@andykirby btw, my MeshTXT web client has support for file transfer over Meshtastic. Obviously not ideal to try sending 5mb PDFs or whatever, but something like a 2kb configuration file can be transferred pretty quickly depending on your LoRa preset.

[@Heniek]

Andy why were you gone for so long? It's sad without you.

[@HotMicSystems]

Thanks brother!

[@djmambito2]

@AndyKirby ... I suppose sending a 7 k voicefile in 1 minute ... makes it against the rules ... or doesn't it ? ... would take just a few stations to completely zap the lora-channels ... or ? ... Such a file of that length will need the highest data-speed if it sends it in less then a minute ... i sup[pose much more that would be permitted ... i also suppose that at that speed the usual Lora range would be way less as for example compared to Meshtastic ... just guessing ... But hey , nice project, well done and lots of innovations to play with.

[@detaart]

It is against the rules, yes. Also, yes, it would cause problems. Routers/repeaters are not possible with this for a start. If you have to go through more hops, not only will you eat through your own duty cycle limit, but also the other nodes. There's a reason this has never been done on lora ... not that it's impossible or hard ... it's just a terrible idea.

[@rfnexusyt]

@@detaart Reticulum does not use flood routing. It uses table based routing unlike Meshtastic. Not every node is a repeater. It is an option you can enable, which is the Transport function. RNodes are just an interface for the network stack itself, and one of many you can use with it.

[@detaart]

@@rfnexusyt Even if repeating is opt-in, lora is still very poorly suited to a protocol that offers file transfers. I can't see this scaling at all. The only other radio interface options i can find in the docs are AX.25 with KISS routing or just plain old KISS routing. FSK @ 1200 baud ... yeah yeah i know, it doesn't have to be, but reasonably speaking, that's what it is very likely to be. Yeah i don't see this working. If they can keep the file transfers to high speed networks only, then fine, but i don't think anyone will be happy in HAM land either if you nuke a channel for 10 minutes because you are trying to send a picture.

[@JK-dx7ex]

Keep building

[@Xaninho999]

STOP THAT CRAP We Want More MESHTASTIC

[@garrisonsan]

MT has kinda peaked, IMO. And their devs are not easy to interact with

[@HotMicSystems]

No.

[@WR3ND]

Lubrication...

[@cskeise]

💙👊😎

[@thepinkunicorn6]

Hi, I made a comment an hour ago but it doesn't seem to be showing up, has it been mistakenly caught in some spam filter? I notice none of the comments mention the name of the project so wonder if that could be it

[@g4lmn-ron401]

I have set up a node, no one near me ...

[@terrysobkowich2084]

Then why Meshtastic ? This seems more capable.

[@Dylanmo]

As far as I can tell, Meshtastic is further along with approachable apps. Being an Apple user I know I'll be watching for an iOS version of Sideband.

[@jaroslavhenzely9533]

These are two different technologies. Edit: Watch till the end

[@cuisinartOH1]

@@DylanmoI was thinking the same thing as I watched this. It seems far too fiddly at the moment.

[@oggaBugga]

Depends on your use case. If you are plotting against the regime of some country, from within that country, reticulum / sideband may be of some use. But for the average user it is essentially pointless ( especially over LoRa )

[@XRinger]

Why Meshtactic? When you can just use your cellphone? Or get a Ham license and $30 VHF-UHF radio? Ask the people in Austin TX why they are installing solar Meshtactic nodes all over the Austin area. In January, the forecasted weather isn't looking so good.

[@PhilG8PJH]

Will this be as rubbish as Meshtastic?

[@andykirby]

No, because you can use any type of connection you aren't just confined to low power radios.

[@AlexanderBarclay-c5l]

Snake sell out grass

[@louleluk]

Interesting but not really friendly user 😮