emory

I now have 3 of these and one of Vero's ham-banders with a keypad on the same platform? you can unlock the TX for GMRS easily in the HT mobile app. The GMRS-Pros are setup for my household system and with channel groups for roaming and other uses. I rather love these things and the location features are nice. I am on a campaign promoting the idea of Vero open sourcing either their mobile app SDK or components and modules of it so we could come up with alternate tooling to manage/configure/provision these suckers without relying on a mobile App that is in a state of non-parity between platforms and the UV-Pro and HT and RadioOddity versions of the VR-N76 apps are also out there in different states of professional and polished releases, and i don't get the impression any of these outfits have a well-staffed engineering team for mobile applications or anything. there are feature differences between the N76-alikes and the GMRS-Pro (NOAA alert/scan isn't on the N76, APRS isn't on the GMRS-Pro, APRS is buggy on the N76s, but i will say there have been at least 2 firmware updates for the GMRS-Pro and 4 or 5 for the N76 family. they recently added support for larger channel groups on the N76 family. really easy to ensure all three of my GMRS-Pros are identically configured to match the other household radios, and when someone's going out the door with one it's immediately useful and can even help people find each other which is my 9yo's favorite feature although she knows the walk home from school just fine she loves to talk to me on her way

i haven't won a game of Spot the Fed in over a decade put me down for "may possibly interfere with linked GMRS repeaters used for d-bag contesting and DoSing my household, but since there isn't a GMRS repeater in my town until about 45 miles out, i'm not too worried about it. when i'm at my other place in PA though a couple of repeaters i use are busy enough i don't need to hear about the grooming strategies of neckbearded weirdos. i could tolerate a few before it got annoying but it sounds like some of y'all are dealing with saturation that disrupts normal people.

My 9yo is way into radio, we did an exercise where we identified the owner of an unattended unused GMRS repeater about 51 miles away. Can't reach it with 5-9W and i've never heard anything but the semi-hourly (every 56mins more or less?) of a CW burst that we decoded together into a GMRS call that we used to lookup the owner! She was super happy to solve a mystery. Man, some of my partner's 15yo's kids are not my biggest fan because I have walked a couple of parents through restoring backups from iCloud to another device when their darling child has intentionally wiped their phone when prompted to hand it over. Bullying. I hear waaaaaay too much about bullying-at-scale via snapchat and other platforms. it's extremely alarming what parents are dealing with these days. I have not heard a lot about cheating but my two are 12 and 9, the 15yo says there's a lot of plagiarism evasion via gen AI happening in high school. solidarity with the parents in this thread. /respect

my keyfob for my car (or any audi/vw) if i'm holding it near my radio or a scanner bursts a crazy transmission that startles me every time! there's something weird with my living room i still can't nail down. my doorbell WiFi connection is unreliable and i'm using Ubiquiti gear here. the chair in the corner of that room is like a portal to another dimension or something. possibly speaker related.

i'm pretty new to Meshtastic, but i love the technology and am going to tinker a bit but i need some devices that will allow me to get started and have a meshtastic environment in use for future projects and neighborhood services. much of what is available for long-range communications via 915MHz Lora radios are development boards and components you can use to assemble and build other things, and sometimes those made devices end up on Etsy where it's pretty easy to spot some cool gadgets for the lab. ## communicator something like a blackberry for messaging and using that meshtastic BBS service (omg waaaannt) is made by many people using the Lilygo T-Deck and T-Deck Plus (or is it pro? those are all sold out anyway the regular T-Deck is what people are selling right now. ### components - lilygo T-Deck https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t-deck ### assembled and for sale - Lilygo T-Deck w SMA, 915MHz, antenna, a blackberry-esque form-factor https://www.etsy.com/listing/1716914571/lilygo-t-deck-wsma-complete-with - T-teck Complete with jumbo 8000mAh battery https://www.etsy.com/listing/1740148840/t-deck-complete-with-8000-mah-battery - with a helix GPS antenna and different design https://www.etsy.com/listing/1710513412/lorameshtastic-lilygo-t-deck "Anyhow! This is a standard Lilygo T-Deck (915mhz), they will all be shipped out flashed with the latest stable firmware, keyboard colors are either black or black, i install 7M-NEO GPS modules and now I’m using helix external antennas for the GPS, and I’ve come to be very fond of the antennas pictured (20cm) as their SWR is at 1.36 which is good enough for the girls I go out with." - Spec5 NOMAD is a bit of a dark horse fake-out; a tiny linux computer with a small qwerty thumboard and a lot of CPU - can operate a Lora radio and be flashed i believe a device like this is necessary (or a raspi in my rack i suppose) for that meshtastic BBS system so i want one of these https://www.etsy.com/listing/1773501856/spec5-nomad-lora-radio-linux-arm ## nodes nodes can be little sensors or compact communications devices, some have eink or OLED displays for stats/power/connectivity. the intended use case is a mobile app on your phone you pair the node to your phone or other device, and then you can send messages and telemetry to people. you can have multiple nodes and use them for different contact with different users. at conferences like defcon these are extremely common and considering the nature of meshtastic and it's privacy features i'm surprised i'm not hearing more alarmist coverage about using things like for black markets and contacting your coke dealer or something. lots of variety on the assembled consumer side, here is a short list i haven't used but have in a shopping cart. ### assembled nodes for sale - heltec v3 meshtastic in a durable shell but the cool part about this one is the strong magnet on it. attach to a vehicle and follow it across town https://www.etsy.com/listing/1718195697/heltec-v3-running-meshtastic-by-ukielab - dashy pro is similar with a 3000mAh battery https://www.etsy.com/listing/1716029292/dashy-pro-complete-device-running - another heltec v3 meshtastic variant https://www.etsy.com/listing/1728849681/complete-device-powered-by-meshtastic - another one USD $61 https://www.etsy.com/listing/1703350315/heltec-v3-running-meshtastic-lora - i just ordered one of these heltec v3s in a pager-style form-factor and i'm super psyched with the pricing too https://www.etsy.com/listing/1766587323/complete-heltec-v3-device-running ## infrastructure nodes made for outdoor applications or for handling more traffic for larger mesh environments. - solar 'repeater' for your yard USD $90 https://www.etsy.com/listing/1776350396/micro-meshtastic-solar-node-rak-wisblock?frs=1 *** Anything else that is ready to use and suitable for getting started that you've found? I'd love to see it before I start ordering!

well the Vero VR-N76 and RadioOddity's remix are the ham band plus keypad sibling of the GMRS-PRO and is in general availability and it's for 2m and 70cm with an override for TX on GMRS bands if you're inclined. it also ships with APRS and BSS and also has a GPS receiver and can 'team up' like and with the GMRS-Pro. the android version of the HT App Vero ships is more capable than their iOS version. you can use either for firmware updates but only the HT App will gate radio tx over IP and out the other end into an HT paired to the network channel on another phone. the location service and the initial firmware refused to respect you disabling digital transmissions. you have to force it to fetch a beta firmware to fix that and several other bugs and enhancements that the GMRS-PRO shipped with. i like these radios a lot but i am super not into a reliance on a smartphone, especially the voice network link part of the HT App. there's baofeng shipping HTs with "voice scramblers" and smartphone apps bridging radios over the Internet, what is happening?

I installed it because Vero's HT App HTs and the GMRS-PRO have some network/channel capability and I was curious what other options were out there. but I can't get over the fact that the reason I've built a GMRS service for the household is because the things that Zello needs aren't hard to have disrupted. Also having people blurt things out from your phone at all hours of the night is amusing and impressive once (there's a Zello Skywarn but guess what: they're never anywhere near your town for that 5am briefing they do) and then rapidly becomes an interruption. I've learned that if i'm using my phone it's because I want to be messaging and calling people for intentional conversations.

i just can't stop thinking that TDMA time slots for DMR aren't that far from the next hot digital format for amateur radio being GSM. are we going to end up with an operator-supported and funded regional babybells without the baggage or utility of SS7?

motion carries, i get this occasionally on my scanners. in the mornings it's accompanied by being able to pick up repeater output multiple states away in the morning and goes away by 8-0830 and returns in the evening. i bought an RF/EM meter to wand around and figure out where it was coming from and one of them was only happening when HVAC kicked on to run fans. another one still to be determined, it ends up being audible in other GMRS frequencies. if you have a hard time finding a meter that isn't overdoing it (some instruments are out there for thousands of dollars you don't need that) here's an old hacker trick: add "ghost hunting" to the search, since apparently "ghost hunters" follow EM/RF physics

this is similar to the experience of using the BTech GMRS-PRO radio. it is extremely frustrating. to make matters worse, the GMRS-PRO uses a mobile phone companion app that basically pulls the rug out from under you on the regular because of this transmit frequency thing. you can use the MyGMRS or RepeaterBook or RR listing and transcribe the frequency for RX and whatever tone you want but then for the input frequency it's just a list of standard GMRS frequency/ies and you configure everything and if it's not RX-only for scanning (like the SEPTA conventional simulcasts on `502.*`) are fine but the moment you have one you can TX to you can't VFO-style input the frequency it's a pull-down on the app and the moment you pick one that uses the right frequency for TX it renames the whole damned thing to the generic listing for that `GMRS.*` or `REPT.*` channel and frequency pair! it drives me crazy you have to really start with the TX frequency every time or you're just going to do everything two or three times. i have a GM21 coming this afternoon, i think it'll be a good fit for my partner, mobile phone style keypad is more familiar for her and having it solely dedicated to GMRS and interacting with FRS radios will keep her from ending up doing truly embarrassing things like attempt to TX on the EMS channels or something. i think it uses Yet Another Application to manage and configure it though it looks like a lot of it can be done on-device. wish they wouldn't have this encrypted scrambling channel hopping option on only four of a dozen shipping HTs but nobody in Product at Baofeng or BTech wants to hear my opinions on that.