Hey.
Before we get started, be sure to head over to Hamradio two dot com forward slash email Dash sign up to join my email list of over nineteen thousand subscribers, where I like to send emails about upcoming events, upcoming shopping deals, keep you updated with all the stuff going on with my videos. Once that list reaches twenty thousand, I will be doing a giveaway of another HF radio sign up today and thank you for the support. Okay, good evening, Thank you for joining. Tonight should be a
fun stream. We're gonna get started here in just one minute. My chat plug in is not working tonight, so sorry, there's no chat on screen, but everybody's here. A good deal Jody with the super chat already, Thanks buddy. All right, I'm just gonna kind of kick it over there. I show seven o'clock in Texas. Good evening, Happy Sunday. Thank you for joining tonight. I'm gonna talk about some mesh tastic stuff. One of the developers of the mesh Tastic
I think he's one of the developers. He's the guy in the chat under the name of mesh Tastic I'm told, so yeah, yeah, good good evening. Thank you for joining. And thank you for the email. But we did the We did live stream with Spec five out of Texas two or three weeks ago, and after that I got an email from these guys. They were like, Hey, we're some of the of the developers of the original mess mesh Tastic firmware hardware, not hardware, but firmware mesh Mesh
networking system. So we're gonna learn all about it tonight, and thanks for joining. Special shout out to all the folks in green text in the chat. I see Doug Douglas V Amateur Radio. Thanks for joining tonight, Tom ed A C three, I K I see you in there. Andy Kelly's in there, Wayne Kermit Cooley, who u KK four p A L. Good evening, prep, Pam Paul, thanks for joining tonight. Buddy Joe, I see you in there. Aaron W six h E R or Arthur. I'm sorry
not Aaron, Arthur. Appreciate you guys being here tonight. I see Rob in there, and uh Izzo appreciate you guys being here as well. So we're gonna we're gonna kick it over to these guys here in just one second. So we're gonna do real quick. I don't really have much in the way of announcements tonight, but we are going to do a happy hour on Black Friday, So Gigabarts is gonna come on. They're gonna tell us about
some holiday specials they're gonna be running. So if you have a YouTube channel, and if you've been on one of my Black Friday or on one of my Happy Hour live streams before in the past, put mark that down on your calendar. Probably start around eight o'clock that night on Friday, Black the Act, the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, So we're gonna be doing a happy hour there, so more to come on that later. Sign up with my email list to keep up with all of that.
If you haven't done that already. All right, let's do this, all right, guys, we're gonna do this already. Okay, let's do it, and we're gonna switch over and unmute you guys. Good evening. How is everybody heat? It's impressive. It's impressive that I ask a group of people how they're doing and Frank doesn't just totally take over the audio, so he's actually he's actually learned not to do that. So yeah, I.
Wait till the done. Then you'd be like, okay, Frank.
So Frank is a developer, He's a C plus plus developer, but he is not a meshtastic developer. I want that made clear. At the beginning of the stream tonight.
We were talking already.
I bet I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it. So I don't do development. When I worked in it, I fixed all the stuff that you could developers broke. That was my job. I was the service desk guy.
So how do you fix code that works perfectly? It's the end users configurations, you think.
Frank, I feel confident You've never had that issue, Frank, but you know, cheers to you, buddy. So restarted, Yeah, yeah, especially if it's on a Windows box you just relooted.
We tried turning on and off again.
Amazing how many times I would just walk in the door and things would start working.
Oh yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. She'll be like, uh, yeah, this is my computer's doing this, and I'm like show me and she's like, well, it's not doing it now.
That's that's mechanics.
Like, yeah, mechanics too, Yeah, totally.
Oh.
The other thing I hate is when you're at someone else's desk and you're like, click on that, and you're like, I'm not going to say it, but I'm staring at the button so hard. It's the start and go to here, but when the roles are reversed, go ahead and go to this and they're like uh and you're.
Like, uh, don't know, don't know, I can't find it. Well, guys, Jonathan, Garth and JM thank you so much for joining me tonight. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have to say. Why don't we go around the room real quick and I'll just I'm just gonna start with Garth because he's at the top of my screen. You guys introduce yourself. Tell us what now are any of you guys Ham Radio operators? I should ask that up front.
KG five are okay?
So Jonathan and Jmr Garth are you? I'm not okay? So you're odd man. Now that's okay, that's all right, there's no problem. We'll fix that totally. Yeah. Yeah, I actually didn't expect any of you to say yes to that, So I'm impressed right now that you guys have my attention. So that's good. Garth, where I'm gonna start with you just give us a little short kind of introduction about yourself, let us know what you do with Meshtastic, and then we'll just move on from there. Thank you for joining.
Yeah. I'm Garth vander Holland.
I work on the IOLs app, Apple, iPad and back apps for Meshtastic, and then work very closely with Ben the firmware and developer to trying to build new features, and Jonathan as well to kind of prototype and build out new features when we have great ideas.
Awesome. And the gentleman who couldn't be here tonight is h what's his name again? It's Ben Ben? Yeah, okay, all right, cool, Well, thank you Garth, thanks for joining us tonight. Jonathan, you're nut next on the screen, go ahead.
Sure, I'm Jonathan Bennett. I am in some circles the Linux Guy. I have a podcast on the twit network with Leo Laporte and then another podcast, Floss Weekly on Hackaday, and one of my listeners was asking about Yeah, I'm that guy if that rings a bell. So one of my listeners was asking about some mesh solution and so I went looking for the different open source mesh solutions I found. I found meshtastic and I've liked it, but
I don't even remember what it was. But something in there drove me nuts, and so I dove into the code. I'm like, hey, let's fix it. So I fixed that, and then I fixed something else that I'm like, oh, you guys have not really well working Linux support. Let me see if I can fix that. And by that point I was just I was hooked, and they made me one of the leads, and then I haven't been able to get away from the project since then.
Well, the guy with the best microphone is a podcaster, So that makes sense. Now, I get it. I get I get where you're coming from. Thanks buddy, thanks for joining us to.
Can I ask you a quick question? Said Twitch? I went there years ago on a visit and that was fun. Are you mona rogue or Brian Brushwood? Do you help him out that much?
No, so, Brian is no longer doing anything with twit. That ended quite a few years ago. I am a fan of Brian's I watched some of their stuff, but I've never I've never interacted.
With I just wonder if you're going to be down there or a founders day, because I'm down there quite Oh cool, but all right, I'm done. I'm done.
There, no no worries. Yeah, thank you, thanks for joining to fan boy now yeah you're you're a fan boy yeah JM your next buddy? What's that? And you got to tell us about the hat? So yeah, yeah, that.
Comes next, That comes next. So yeah, am I used to be a pretty in depth coder Imgetastic. For for a while, I was the number two coder. And actually he lived just a couple of miles away from the founder of the Mechtastic software. His name is Kevin, really wonderful person. We get together every once in a while, and he just kept pulling me and pulling me into the project. And one day he just started referring to
me as the project lead. I'm like, hmm, all right, right, I got as, I got this, people's the project lead. I'm like, okay, sure, sure, sure, And you know what the title It sort of stuck. And so I haven't really written much code in the while, but take on a lot of the administrative, all the fun things like lawyers and copyrights and more and more.
Lawyer you have drink from a couple.
Heard yeah, fun stuff, but had so I was at open sauce. Uh the this William Housman's thing down here in the San Francisco Bay area and they're giving away free pencils. All right, all right, I got a pencil, you know what, There's not much I can do with a pencil. And they're selling these hats for like five dollars. No what, I'm going to trade you this pencil for that hat.
How very Ryan Trayhan of you. That's great?
Yeah, yeah, it was awk. This hat is has the value of a pencil.
Okay, that's good.
And one day I'm going to be on Jason's show one day. This has been in the back of my car, literally in the pile in the back of my car. Well, I'm like, I'm going to be on show, I remember.
Okay, Well, well I am glad you're here man. Thank you for joining tonight. And that's really cool. That's that you're already Ham radio operator. So that's a that's a plus in my book. But yeah, all right. So so frank uh you're watching the chat for questions, So anybody that wants to uh ask anything, please do feel free. But yeah, so tell us all about mesh Tastic, how it came to be. Now, have have any of you, especially you two Hams. You guys ever heard of Arden?
M so broadband broadband HAM network it used to be, and then Arden kind of like was a new flavor of it. It's bait. It's mesh networking with Ubiquity or Tepee link type routers that we flash with the customized firmware and put up in the air and create an external mesh network, usually on the HAM radio portion of the two point four gigahertz band, which is just on
a few frequencies below the public Wi Fi band. You can do it on nine hundred megahertz and five gigaherds and three giga it used to be three gigaherts also, But right, yeah, so it it's it's still out there, it's still being used. There's there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it. But when mesh tasted, when I first learned them, I was not an early adopter of mesh Tastic, But when I first learned about it, I was like, Man, this sounds a lot like Arden,
but it is better for two different reasons. Because number One, most of y'all's stuff, I think, or most of the stuff I've done, is on the nine hundred megahertz band, which which has which it's broader banded than two point four gigahertz or five gigaherts, so it reaches out farther and it penetrates, penetrates buildings and infrastructure a little bit better. And it's uh, and it's it's since it is on the ITSM band, or at least that part of it is.
It's open to the public. It's you don't have to have a ham radio license or any other type of license to use it, unlike Arden and broadband hamnet, which I think those guys have their place. And I still have an Ardent router back here behind me that's still connected and I do some stuff with. But I think mesh Tastic is great because it's open to everybody, and the hardware is pretty inexpensive, and I really think using the nine hundred megahertz ban is it was a total
win that for that for that system. So I'm curious to see what you guys have to think about that or if you have anything to add to that. But yeah, tell us all about Meshtastic. Start wherever you want to, and we'll just kind of, you know, go back and forth. Like I said, I shoot from the hip and let's just dive into the conversation.
Yeah, art and is interesting just first off, because that's that's built on open WRT, which is one of my
favorite open source projects. Those guys are amazing. And yeah, one of the interesting differences I'm gonna let Jam jump in here in just a second, but one of the interesting differences is in in Meshtastic, especially in the nine to fifteen band, we have a lot less bandwidth, right, so, like we're doing text, text messages mostly, and there's been some people playing with things other than just that, but
it's almost entirely text messages. Whereas when you're in two point four, you know you're you're pushing more like what Wi Fi can do, and so you know, you measure that in the megabits, whereas we don't. We're not in the megabits. We have much less bandwidth than that. But the trade off, of course, like you said, so we can go much much much further. Our record right now is like somewhere around two hundred kilometers. I think somebody got off a balloon. It's a long way.
Yeah, Okay, there's actually are Yeah, there's actually some firmware for Arden that will work on nine hundred mega hurts ubiquity and antipe link routers, and you can, you can hardline, you can, you can mesh them together. You just connect an Ethernet cable to a nine hundred megahertz radio to a two point four gigahertz radio and then they kind of see each other. They won't communicate VRF, but you
can you can connect them that way. But for whatever reason, the nine hundred megahertz side of Arden just really never took off, or at least I don't hear much about it. So I think that was kind of like could have been something that maybe would have worked better, but I
don't know. I the there's a there's a group up here in North Texas that does balloon launches and they're like these big, like like fifteen twenty foot tall weather they're not weather balloons, but they're kind of that that genre. And they'll they'll put payload on the balloons, and they'll put APRS digit peters, and they'll put DMR HAM radio repeaters, and they'll put meshtastic on it up and it's gone up to ninety ninety five one hundred thousand feet and
you're getting meshtastic singles from everywhere. It's really cool. Yes, I would guess it's probably more than two under kilometers, but I don't know. I don't know what their record is, so I have to check with them someday. But it's it's it's it's definitely a cool thing.
Ye know.
The Ardent folks actually got a hold of me. This was must have been about four years ago. They're talking about doing a an art and meshtastic integration. They had this nice little news written up and they're like, yeah, so we're wondering if you could do a talk on this. I'm like, I'm happy to do a talk on it. So who's doing this integration? And they're like you are, like what.
So here's my early rate right right right? Yeah?
Wow, it was.
It was a fun way of community building and trying to loot people in to do stuff. I appreciated the effort, but it was fun. But you mentioned the frequency, right, So most of our radios actually use a worldwide transceiver radio. The only real difference most of the time is just a little loading capacitory. It's like twenty two Pico Ferris versus you know, one ten. But they'll go down to like one hundred and twenty megahertz up to like nine to eighty most of the times off the exact same ship.
So if you are licensing, you have full rain to go through and play with things quite a bit.
That's pretty cool, Okay, okay, sweet good.
Yeah, so Garth just whispered into my ear, which was a little weird, Garth. But we've got a link on the meshastic docks where the range test is, and so when we when we throw a range out there, that is it's confirmed right like, so we know exactly where one node was, exactly where the other one was, and the current the current record is actually three hundred and thirty one kilometers and that's mountain top to mountaintop.
Wow. So that's Earth station to Earth stations. It's not that it's not a balloon, not an airplane, because because there's there's people who have had meshtastic devices and airplanes flying over certain areas Las Vegas in my case, but I didn't say that. So, but I live right next to DFW Airport. So every now and then you can get on the chat and you can look and you're like twenty thirty, you know, thirty three thousand feet or seventeen thousand feet or whatever. You're like, wow, oh there
he is. Oh yeah, now he's over there. He's movie kind of fast. So yeah, that that happens.
Yeah yeah.
Our modulation ess actually based on Laura, but Laura. The company Semtech got it from Chirp spreads Spectrum, which was originally designed for interstellar satellite communication. Really really really long long range stuff.
That's awesome.
The French company just brought it down literally to Earth made it. You put it into the lope. I had to. I made it accessible, right, uh. And so the technology is designed to go really really far. And you asked, are you am, well, I'm actually thinking about doing a a meshtastic Earth Moon Earth bounce, right, That's why I got I think.
That's a great idea.
Out and go, hey everyone, that's chat like that's the moon.
Yeah.
So anyone listening has access to really nice power applifiers and really nice low noise applifiers to talk to because we want to make this happen.
That's that's fun. Yeah, we we can. We can do that. I can get I can get with you on that. We can do that. It would be fun. That'd be great.
So actual bi direction, not just you know, one way, but right.
Actually communicate right off off the moon. Moon bounced nine hundred signal off the moon. I mean, what what would you do it on nine hundred? What what band would you do it on?
Pribbly switch over to two point four. Just because the equipment is cheaper, the antennas are smaller. It's just it's an easier band to work with, right, Just it's more consumer frient and if the plan is going to be this is a community effort. Nine hundred heard, equipment is actually big. It's it's to be cobbled together. And so in the two point fours, it's off the shelf.
Right, what what whatage can you do with two point four?
Then if you're licensed, you got it all. You got the whole one point five k all right, just you know, keep it really narrow, don't pasthma too much, don't mess it up.
I gotta review that because of the two point four, they might be a little it.
Might be a little bit less, I don't know what, because of what.
The bleed over to the the spectrums. Because we only have a sliver bandwidth on the two point four. It's not like we have a Ride of Rain.
And the and the two point four giga heard samplifiers are going to be much more costly than a nine hundred Meggert samplifier. Yeah so yeah, so there's that. But but you know, people, I mean, you just need to find someone who already has one, and we can, you know, kind of go from there.
We could ask side Boom to make one, ha ha.
Ask the CB, the CB guy to make a two point four gig heard samplifier that I'm sure that'll be very clean and no problems at all. I hope he's in the chat. I hope you heard me say that. Side Boom he'll pop up.
Don says we have a full fifteen hundred watts okay, especially on that band. Okay, I no doubt them.
That's good.
I will say that the FCC has absolutely no sense of humor about getting out of your band and messing with two dot four. You mentioned open WRT and the TP link. I was part of the group trying to save open w RT on tp link back when the FCC was going to hand down that rule that says you must lock down your firm where you guys remember.
That, yeah they yeah, that was that was not a good.
Time for being an open WRT fan. Well, and that's because somebody was messing around with two four radio waves they had they had a cheap TP link and they'd gone in and they tinkered with it in the software and so they were I forget whether they were broadcasting too loud or just on slightly the wrong frequency, but it was messing with like some hospitals internal systems. Yeah, and so they got it, got a complaint in the FCC was like, we are not going to put up with this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Well I guess uh yeah, I mean FCC does care about some things, not not everything, but some things they do.
Yeah. I like this question right now, whiskey e Mike Keilo golf Ham Radio asking is sped trektor sped spectrum rules for ten applications to the two point four gigaherts? Is it acoable.
Spread spectrum to two point four gigaherts?
Spreads spread frum ten watts equable to the two point four gigaherts. So is there a what limit on spread spectrum? It sounds like there is, but is also to the point two point four I don't know.
There is less of so there is frequency hopping spread spectrum, and then there is I forget which one we're you're using, there's the spread spectrum where you're not actually hopping frequencies. If you're hopping frequencies, you have more power than if you're not hopping. Metshastic does not hop mm hm yeah, okay, all right.
So I do have an agenda here. So, like I said, I like to I like to just kind of see where the story was, but we're gonna spin it in a we're gonna kind of keep it on track here. So the uh, the information that that Robert sent me was or I guess Bob. He goes by Bob right either way. Uh, introduction to mess mesh Tastic. Brief origin story how it got started. One minute overview. So let's that's here. Who wants to? Who wants to?
That's Jam.
That's okay, all right, Oh it's jam.
Good goodness. So, uh mesh Tastic was started by our faithful Founder's name is Kevin. He's one of these this mythical ten X engineers where he looks the next day it's done, Oh my gosh, one of these these magic people. He worked at n Video, he worked at Google and he's now wonderfully retired, traveling whenever I messaged, we be chat every once in a while. He's just in another part of the world, right, he's just happily, happily retired. And look at this guy. He likes parasailing, he likes
hiking when he goes par para lighting. Uh, he has this issue where sometimes you don't know where his friends are. They just you know, got off somewhere when he's going hiking. Right, you want to know where your friends are, you know
where your kids are. And yeah, he started looking around at technologies and he stumbled onto Laura, stumbled onto a couple dev kids by some of some of the manufacturers, Hell Tech lily Go and really just came up with this, this real simple prototype in just a couple of weeks and put it out there, made it open. Socores got a hold of that guy with a Swiss accent who picked up wrote about it, and I think that's where a lot of the popularity really came around. That's where
the community started getting built. And there it really did become a community all out effort. There's been use cases here that you just would not even believe. Pollution monitoring tribes in the Amazon rainforest, who has no cell phone reception, hoisting Android phones up in the trees, just being able to chat with each other. It's just all over the place and it's wild. It really is wild, just how much this is being used.
Absolutely, yeah, I couldn't agree more cool. Well, that's a that's a cool story. We have to try to contact Kevin and get him on one of these days. Would love to have him on. So. So the current state of mesh mesh tastic a quick update on how it has evolved, and mentioned the community and development growth over time. So community, do you guys have a discord server?
Absolutely you do.
So there's a North Texas Mesh discord server and there's a Austin Mesh discord so here in Texas. Obviously those are those. I'm a member of both of those, and I shared this link in the chat, So you guys shout out in the chat if you're from one of
those discord communities please. But but yeah, if you guys have an overall mestastic discord, please feel free to pop that if you if it's open to the public, that is, feel free to pop that link in the chat and I'll share it in our chat over here, but tell us a little bit about the the community and the and how it's evolved.
I could probably go with this.
So the founder of Kevin had had some spine issues actually and had to step back as he was told by the doctors, no more, no more sitting and coding, and so I was I was actually looking for the issue. Number two was we need a iOS app, and I was looking for an opportunity to write an iOS app. And I had been chatting on the discourse which is now sort of paused and closed, and I had been
working with Ben uh on just making solar nodes. I originally started doing Mestastic because I was out hiking near my parents' place and disappeared for seven hours off of out of cell phone service, and my dad got kind of annoyed with me and said, hey, if you're going to disappear for seven hours and need some way to communicate, And I went on all the express and found mestastic and some devices and ordered them, and so I sort of started out there and then got tired of carrying
around my iPhone and my burner Android phone in order to be able to use mestastic and started working on the iOS app, and then Kevin was stepping back from the project, and so he recruited Ben to do the firmware. I was working on the iOS app. We have an Android developer in Brazil who he asked to start working
at So Kevin truly was a tenx developer. He was running the Python cli, he wrote the Android app, he wrote the firmware, He was simultaneously releasing them all and so at this point me and what was kind of six ' ten people, well took us probably a year to just kind of get back to the cadence that Kevin was doing on his own. And then we went through a really painful process of upgrading to one point three and then the two point zero.
Version of mesh Tastic.
We broke everything for a while, which was not a real great experience for a lot of the users, but they stuck with us.
We kept adding features.
Each of us added a you know, kind of took JM organize this thing, so he kind of set out the roadmap of what we were going to do on the one point three two point zero time frame. I was working on the iOS app. Ben was adding some
telemetry firmware features. So we have so much traffic. Now it seems a little weird, but at the time a lot of people were setting up very temporary meshtastic networks, so they were airsofting or hiking or parrot gliding, and those radios were only up for the time frame that
that activity was taking place. And so Ben and I grabbed the telemetry part and said, hey, it'd be great if we could add some weather station features and give people a reason to keep these devices up when they're not using them as part of a network, and then
we worked on that. You can see there's like there's a Lark weather station here from from df robot that you can plug into the Ice squared CEA on Mettastic now and it has annometer, which is a which has been a hard hard device to find on Ice squared C. We decided to go with Ice squared C because they're automatically detected and made the user experience of hooking up a censor a lot easier. And then we've just really had phenomenal growth from from there to now.
So when we first started, I'd say, we can you know, these are devboards.
It's a little hard to track who's using what We were initially only available on Android. All the configuration was done with the CLI. I do a lot of UX work at my job and was interested in in doing the i US happened then kind of moving away from being a CLI first application and kind of grabbing all the all the regular users out there. HAM Radio has been really great for us, but it's more of a hub and spoke thing with mettastic as you called that earlier.
UH.
The on the need the lack of a need.
For a license is really almost what a lot of ham's like because they can include their friends and family that that aren't going to get a license or think this shack is kind of a lot the big antennas, and this gives this gives them a way to get radios in the hands of of all their regular friends in family. So that's kind of in a lot of cases the the HAM is kind of the central person that helps build out the network and then all of their regular friends in family become the uh the other
users on the network. The growth wise one of the features. After after we'd finished the telemetry, Ben and I worked to create what is called the m q TT proxy. So instead of using the Internet to communicate between two nodes, over your Wi Fi network at home.
You could use your phone to kind of act as.
That Wi Fi cellular connection in between to bridge networks where there aren't necessarily mesh Tastic nodes.
In the middle.
And then since we've created that, we've kind of had to spend a bunch of time on you know, throttling the traffic and figuring out how to keep things running. As it now, so there's fifty million packets a week that are going over this MQTT server that meshtastic ruds.
So the growth has been really amazing. It's been tricky.
I know, not everybody has loved every restriction we've had to put in place along the way in order to sort of keep it running. But also, you know, a year and a half ago, it didn't work at all because it was so clogged up, and then it would flood the Laura mesh because Laura is obviously low bandwidth,
and the Internet can handle a ton of bandwidth. So we had to figure out how to do that bridge without wrecking the best part of metschastic, which is the long range, the Laura part, and covering those long distances. The official record that we have is three hundred and thirty three kilometers, I do believe. Recently in Poland they used a balloon and went close to five hundred.
Wow.
So and you know, it seems like seems like there's some desire for some Texas pride to try and try and beat that kind of record with the balloon, I would imagine.
So yep, we can do it. We can do it. So you you touched on the subject I wanted to ask about tonight. So I'm just going to go ahead and dive into that right now. MQTT. So, we have a we have a Ham radio show in Dayton, Ohio every year in May. It's the largest Ham radio show in the world. And there's about thirty thirty to thirty three thousand people there every every year from for like a four day weekend from like Thursday at this Sunday. So a group of us took Meshtastic to that show
last year and I had m QT. I have a Meshtastic node running in my truck twenty four to seven, and I had m QTT. I also have a Wi Fi and Internet in my truck twenty four to seven, and I had m QTT running. And and I think I think two or three other people had it running. Also, I don't think it was totally my fault, but we we totally clogged that network up. So my question is when is m QTT. When's the right time to use it? And if you are using it, should you be on
another setting besides the long fast? Should you should you go into the short fast or the whatever the other? There's like five or six settings in there that are long fast. I was gonna I was gonna get you guys do a brief overview of what all the long fast and short fast and all those settings mean. But as far as m QTT goes, what's the best time
to use it efficiently? Efficiency wise? I mean, we don't want to the purpose of mesh Tastic and ham radio both is to communicate, and if we clog up the network or bog it down with too many packets and then you're failing to communicate. So we don't want to do that. So what's a good situation to use that in?
So let me start off by saying that we noticed that, we saw that that was a problem, and actually what we ended up doing is.
We're Hams, so we break stuff. That's what we do best. So yeah, okay, So we saw that was a problem.
So now if you use the default setting on our public m QTT, we actually zero hop all of the packets, which means that your device doesn't rebroadcast any of those so you can't bring the local mesh down by accidentally or intentionally connecting to m QTT. So on one hand, that's really good. On the other hand, it kind of like shoots some of the benefit people were getting out of that. But at the same time, there's just so
much traffic on the MQTT server. It's just it's just impractically it came to the point to where as, as you found out, it just doesn't work anymore. Right, So we've zero opted, But that's only if you're using the default channel, right. So where MQTT really makes sense is
kind of for more bespoke situations. So either I've got my own channel with my own password, and i want it to be available in a couple of different locations, so I'm going to wrap that through the MQTT server, or if i want to set my own MQTT server up, because you can put it on a Raspberry Pie or whatever, you know, it's the Mosquito software. You can run it yourself and then you know, kind of the sky is
the limit with what you want to do. And we kind of have the the thought there that if someone is sophisticated enough to set up their own MQTT server, then ideally they're going to be sophisticated enough to not shoot themselves in the foot with it. Now, that's not necessarily a safe assumption, but that's kind of where we've landed.
Well, if you know enough to use the tools, then I'm going to give you all the bottom so you could do whatever you want. And if you shoot yourself in the foot, that will happen because I gave you this powerful tool set. Because if I give you powerful tools, you're going to do powerful and awesome things with it. I give you a limited sandbox, then I'm limiting your ability to do stuff.
Yeah, so we've seen a couple of just to dive into that a little bit more, we've seen a couple of times in different situations in meshtastic where people were shooting themselves in the foot and not realizing it.
Right.
So, one of the other things that was happening with m QTT is that people were often sending like their raw position over m QTT and therefore broadcasting it on the internet, and it was it was for a while there it was really really easy to accidentally do that. And the way that kind of came to a head is we have somebody in the in the community that said, well, I've got all this position data, let me just put
it online in a map. And suddenly, you know, that became popular and people went, wait a second, why am I on the map? Why is my house on the map?
Because you broadcasted it there. Yeah yeahh but I mean did it realize it? Yeah? Yeah, but they yeah, totally. Okay.
So the point, the point we've come to is, yes, there will always be some footguns, but what we're going to try to do is make it impossible to use one of those footguns and not like not realize it, like totally do it by accidents, kind of automatically fail into a foot gun. And so that's where some of these changes like shutting down zero hopping the public the default channel on MQTT comes from, because it was so it was so easy to blunder into that without realizing.
It was wasn't There also.
Often to how we actually grew from our origins originally Fantastic was designed for networks of you know, twelve twenty maybe thirty devices at most, because that's all we could fit onto the actual available bandwidth. But we've grown from there to just recently be at Defcon two thousand devices
on a single network. And a lot of this growth on you know, optimization, so streamlining the protocol, transmitting less often, and leave yourself on these default networks and you turn on some of the tools that we have developed for private networks. That's where these stilability comes in because you know, having everyone on the same default network that wasn't the original design. It was originally designed for you, your little
hiking group, right right. What happened, and this is awesome, is we now have these large communities that have formed and they're making friends, they're chatting with each other on it. Just last night, I was waiting at the vet just you know, eavesdropping, Hey, how are you doing? I haven't spoken in a while. Like, it's the hyper community that we want to see, right, And the thing that Jonathan and Garth is talking about is the curating of that public network to make this and all this youth fit
on the available bandwidth that we have. Right and it's really not hard, not easy to do.
I will give a shout out real quick. You're talking about talking to people saying hey, how you doing. It's been a while so I haven't seen much of that in my area. I'm hoping that changes soon. But my wife and I took a vacation last July, I think June end of June, end of June, end of July, and we flew to Anchorage, Alaska, and we spent a couple of days. Then we got on an Alaskan cruise.
Walking down the downtown streets of Anchorage, Alaska, I had my mesh Tastic note with me and I was chatting with two or three people and there was just it was just like, hey, what's going I was like, Hey, we're in Anchorage. And someone came back and said, hey, welcome to Anchorage. Where are you from? And I chatted with him for a few minutes, and I'm like, this is the type of thing that I would like to see happen everywhere I go, and I have not. I
have not seen it everywhere. I haven't tried it everywhere either, but I've tried it at home. But in Anchorage, Alasha, shout out to anybody in Anchorage. If anyone is in the chat in from Anchorage, Alaska, let me know. But they have a great community out there, very just welcoming. And I mean, you know, all we did was chat for like five minutes. What any big deal. But I thought that you said that about chatting when you're at
the VET and whatnot. I'm like, that's the kind of thing that you want to see more of, or at least I do. So that's that's a that's a good deal.
The ham mentioned thing really was, like I know, Josh from HRCC also sort of feels like he crashed the network. The reality was is our network was too fragile at the time, and you guys put three hundred people in a metal building and and taught us some lessons that we needed to learn.
We're hands this is what we do. So yeah, yeah, no, So that was fantastic.
The spectacular success of def cod was entirely related to Josh's video is titled did Mettastic Die at him?
Mentioned Yeah, yes, yes, yes it did.
Yeah I saw that.
And so Mia, Jonathan and Ben worked and Ben can probably speak some to how they built some of the fantastic firmware updates to that. But that is kind of the point that we uh so, Ben and I are both dot net developers in our day job, and we built a tool to sit in front of the MQTT
server and do this zero hopping blocking of spam. It reduces the number of ports that are sent over the MQTT to focus on discovery and messaging and positions instead of weather stations and detection sensors and some of these other features that are great, but they're not They're not
something that should be part of a conference. And so if it was not for hamvention and and kind of the data that we gathered from that, there's no way we would have had the success that we had at Defcon and to have what seems to be probably about three thousand so ten percent of the note ten percent of the people at Defcon had a fantastic node.
Which was just unbelievable.
And Jonathan could speak to some of the technical work that was done to facilitate.
That, but I'm kind of interested what rut twigs did you do to help well.
So so well, great, hold on one second, gray Man Poda's in the chat saying exactly what I'm thinking. He says so I'm hearing hold my beer for Daton twenty twenty five because yeah, okay, in May, in May of this of next year, buddy, it's going to be on all right.
So let me tell you here's what we did. We actually made a custom firmware release for def Coon, and then we actually did it again for Burning Man. Had a better experience at def Con than we did burning Man, but we were late to the game on burning Man. So here's what we need to do. We need to make sure and get this out sooner rather than later so that you have enough people coming. So what we did with this custom firmware release is we put it on the I think the short fast, which is, you know,
the the quickest of all of our presets. It's the one that's quickest has it spends the least amount of time on air for a you know, given amount of bites. So we turned we turned that on. We added some code in there so like, if something we need to get need to get into hops still hops is its
whole thing. But like so if somebody says I'm going to put my node on seven hops so that everybody could hear it, we would detect that and we would say no, no, no, you use three hops, and we're going to treat this packet as if you were using three hops. And then some of the stuff that we do for the m QTT server where we block some of that telemetry and stuff, we did that in the firmware for this,
just for this custom firmware for these events. And so what that does is it takes you know, all of the what would be the kind of background noise that nobody cares about at an event, right Like, I don't care what kind of battery life you're getting. I don't care what percent charge your battery is of these other two thousand notes, so we sh don't send that. Like there's a whole bunch of those things that we just
don't send. Changed some we changed some defaults to make it better, and boy that that made a huge difference.
Well, so, how how difficult or complicated is it to make a custom firmware for an event like that?
It's not particularly Now that we've got the work done, we just go to the we call it death Fantastic. We just go to that firmware risk repository. I think that one's I think that one's publicly available.
So I need to bring you guys. I need to bring you guys back onto the channel in January because our second largest show of the year is in the middle of February in Orlando and there'll be about probably eight to ten to twelve thousand people there. So it's about one third the size of date of Hamvention. But
it's a it's a fantastic show. And if we can kind of like test bed that it's a test bed as far as HAM Radio goes, then we can see, you know, maybe how well this custom firmware works for for HAM Mention, which is in May, you know, four months later.
So you said you already read this with three thousand people over at deaf.
Cod about this about how many notes we think we're there yet three thousand.
Hauntsville survived as well, So Huntsville was after Dayton.
Yes, Huntsville is not nearly the size of Dayton though, So Huntsville is probably like six thousand, five six thousand, Pele Orlando's around ten, and then Dayton's like thirty. Now, not all those people have meshtastic nodes obviously. Okay, there's probably more than three thousand people at def Con. That's just how many nods you had, right, right, So yeah, so how many people would be there with nodes? I mean,
who knows. I'll I'll have three nodes myself because I'll have one in my truck that don't worry about my camera, I'll fix it, and it's I'm still on battery power because I haven't found my power supply. I'll have one in my truck. I'll have one in my pocket, and I'll probably have a backup one that's not running right now, but you know it'll it'll be a backup node for to turn on my pocket whatnot. So yeah, I'm gonna change my battery out. But you guys go ahead going to the next thing, Frank.
Yeah, And we love these events. We originally designed for just a couple dozen, but every single time were we come up to another event that just pushes us even just a little bit further. We look at it like the NASCAR or the Formula one. Right, what else can we do to push this a little bit further. Let's put some of our latest technologies, the latest you know, quality of service measures. Let's try it out. Because what we learn from these events we then bring back into
the general use. Right, So if you get more of this, we learn, we understand what's going on, and we make everyone else better from these little trials. So it may or may not work, we don't know, but whatever happens.
We learn, well we're happy to help, you know, test it and whatnot. Because yeah, yeah, I mean, ham radio is all about experimentation. You guys probably already know that, but yeah, I mean we're we're that's this is right up our alley.
So I see a question here, as popping up a couple of times. Is there any time there's encryption on these no's for your private channel and especially if you start moving these over to the handbands? How's that going to affect things? Because amateur radio operators can't encrypt or ofuscate the meaning of the message.
You get to send in the clear.
Take this one here, So we actually have a mode called is licensed, and if you are a licensed operator, your packets will be the encryption of your packets will
be disabled on the network you are on. And just you know, internally we were talking about this just about two weeks ago, that it's possible that even though you are licensed, because of the routing protocol, you might be forwarding encrypted packets and we don't know if that would or would not violate FCC, right, because you're not actually the originator, right, you don't know if it's encrypted. You don't know if it's not encrypted. You're just boarding.
That was the second one. I saved a couple of questions.
I just turned that off. Even though I'm licensed, I turn it off because I'm also a citizen and ism band is a citizens band for lack of a better term. So I just turned that off. I had that on it first, and I just like, you know what, it's disables encryption, it does this other thing. I just turned that off. I don't even don't even put that but.
If you sorry. The other thing we're thinking about is putting being licensed a property of the actual network. You're on itself, right, so.
The network to go down that.
Yes, everyone on here, whether you're licensed or not, turn off your encryption, just just flat out that way. If you're on, there is no risk of you violating those rules. Right now. It's up to you to still not have power amplifiers that go above your your license Santa stay with in your your band plan. Still up to you.
But if you alter the equipment, that's on you but but if you make a properties of the bands, like oh, I'm in the commercial bands where we can do encryption. But if you enable the advice and the options to say, okay, I'm on the handbands now, you just disable it completely because it's operating on a different frame.
Well, the nine hundred megahertz band is an ISM band, but it's also a hand band, but we're secondary on that band, so it's a shared band for us. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on on nonmega herts that we can't technically do with our license in FLICTED. But but but it's since we're a citizen, we can
use other things to do. So it's kind of like one of those things where it's it's like, I don't know, it's like you can you can do everything and claim oh I was using it for this thing, not this thing.
I don't know, what do you mean. I was on the hand bands, I was up earning on the commercial bands because it was a commercial device.
Nine megicans it's almost the same thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I do. I do want to keep us moving. This is great. You guys are doing a great job. So, uh, the the one on the document that Robert sent this is this is this is when I wanted to ask anyway an explanation of hops. We you guys talked about zero hop earlier and uh and seven, I'm gonna turn mine on seven hops and know you're gonna do three hops, So explain. I know what this is, but this is for the audience. Explain what a hop is?
It goes in beer.
Yes, correct, because I'm like, I'm like, I hope you're a stout guy and not an IPA guy. Otherwise get off on my channel. So yeah, yes, yes, an explanation of packet hops. How's that is that?
Better?
Packet hops?
I mean it's it's basically just a number that is inside of the header of the packet that when you receive a packet off the airwaves and then send it on, you decrement that number by one, and so by default it starts at three. You can turn it all the way up to seven if you really want to, but please don't unless you really really have a good reason for doing so. And so once once that, it's kind of like for networking guys, it's a lot like the TTL the Time to Live. It's very similar idea, and
so it. When the set number ticks down to zero, packet or radios just stop rebroadcasting. And the reason that's fairly important is because you don't want to packet storm. And so if you're in a situation where you have a lot of traffic, uh, you can actually get into a packet storm where a radio, because these things have very limited ram, very limited memory. Oh yeah, a radio can forget that it's seen a packet. And if that packet, you know, has a a hops limit that is too high, uh,
it could hear it again and rebroadcast it again. And so just because the you know, the bandwidth on these modes, on these uh, it is so limited. Uh, it does not make sense in almost any situation to try to set your hops limit higher than three uh. And and we really really encourage people not to do that unless they really really have a precise reason why choose.
Yeah, ask how you figure that out?
If you heard the level, we have a low level answer, which I think my answer your question about how we figured this out. Right, So, when when people think about communicating between two points, we are very familiar with the internet. I'm sending a message for me to you, right, and they think that's one hop, but do.
A trace route. It's not one. Do a trace route.
Each of those is.
A hop incorrect.
When you're in RF and you send a radio transmission out there, you're not on a broadcast medium. That message you send out, it gets sent out to everyone within range, everyone within that topic graphical area. And what you really want is that packet, that that message to be received by everyone near you and everyone who's really far away. And so what our algorithm does is we say everyone's really far away will be your first hop, right, and
so those those people will retransmit your message. That way, the message goes as far as possible into the most interfered areas of your network. And one of the the perceptions people have is if I set my hops greater than three, nice picture. If I set my hops greater than I'll get to more places.
And you know, yes, but is it efficient?
Yes it does. But what you're actually doing is you're about tripling the cost over the air for that VAT, and we actually have data on this. You're only improving your reception by about a percent percent in the half right. We've proven this by doing both simulations using our actual software and through real world testing. So there's a huge, huge cost on increasing the hops, but at seems to be the magic number. It just seems to work there, really really well.
I think that's good number.
Yeah, as you look at the graphic that's up there, I think that's a really good visual way to because one of the things with three hops is that your initial radio where you sent it out and it has three hops, you're not counted there, and the destination is not counted.
So it's gone from.
Your radio through three radios and then a destination at that point. So three sounds like a small number, but if you do seven, it's that number is now nine. And so if you had if you have a mountaintop repeater, and you have many radios that are a long distance apart, you might have the need for more hops in order to get to where you're going.
But the beacons of gondor if you're if you're if you're trying to get the beacons on the mountaintops go right, the beacon can marry. Yeah, you might need more than three.
Yeah, so and you'll kind of find that you need.
You know, if you're if you're not making it over a really long distance and you have a really well set up network, and the trace we'ro oute, like you said, is never making it to the last thing. Then then increasing hops can't help. But in general you've probably hurting yourself most of the time, especially if most people are in kind of.
A denser area and then and then they're.
Doing these bridging between you know, distances where there's less humans in between basically. And so I think that graphic, one of our other bends, we seemingly have a post of bends that works on our documentation, came up with this graphic, and I think it's a really good representation of what's really happening there.
So nice.
Nice, I've never even seen this graphic. This is awesome.
That's got to be. That's got to be a Spec five graphic because that's their case in the in the middle there.
No, that is a tropho Tony Tony's case. That isn't fantastic. Absolutely, that's a metastic logo on there.
It's possible, this is what it is. Okay, Okay, it's possible. I have too many no's and I get them all confused because I have I own about ten or twelve different notes. I don't have run them all at the same time. But I have so well all right, so yeah, yeah, so this one, this one is good here and this one I'm gonna learn something on this one. So this is again from Robert SOLISTI sent me an overview of PKC and it's role in secure and communication within the network.
I don't know what pk C is. I have no idea what that is.
Public soblic key cryptography, Yeah, this this one is.
It was my baby.
So we had a we had a problem. We had a problem in meshtastic that a lot of people unfortunately didn't realize. And that's when when you send a direct message between two notes. So like we have, we have two different ways you can send messages. You can send a broadcast message everybody in the channel gets it. You could send a direct message and that is only to a specific person, a specific other node to be precise.
And the way this used to work was you sent it exactly like a broadcast message, which the little note on there that says, hey, this is to this person, and so it was it was actually really really trivial to read those direct messages if you were on the same network, so like if you had the same password, you could.
You could.
It was very trivial to write some hacked firmware that would just accept all of those messages, and people didn't realize that that's really what the problem was. It like we had it in the documentation, but not everybody realized it. And so every once in a while you would see somebody would share like a screenshot of something where it's like, here's this direct message that somebody sent that's really pretty personal and we probably shouldn't be seeing it right now
because they didn't realize what was going on. Here's the direct message, right And so there was a it's been a couple of years ago now, a user saw this and said, well, hey, why don't we do some public key cryptography. He sent a pull request in for it, and there was a little bit of back and forth, and then like he just kind of I don't know what happened to him. He had to move on to something else and it never got moved over the finish line. And so I came along and I said, hey, this
is actually really good work. I bet I can rewrite this, make it work, change a couple of little things about it, and push it over the finish line. And we did, and so that was in what a two pot five I think is the firmware where that landed. And it is what we do is on device, on first device boot, we generate a public key, and then after that, when we send out our note info like hey, I'm on the network, here's my here's my node number, and here's my short name and long name, we now say and
here's my public key. And so any device that you have a public key for, you can then encrypt using if you want to know, it's it's elliptic kalk cryptography. It's it's the X two five, five one nine curve. So all for all the crypto nerds out there that that's a thing for everybody else.
Been a while, yeah, yeah, I lived in that world.
Yeah, And so it it is actual public key crypto. So you can now send direct messages between two nodes and they could share even the public channel, and it is a truly encrypted message now and you can't spy on anymore.
How how long are your messages can be within the data payload, because the keys are depending how many characters said it to are quite long.
We are using I think it's sixteen. I think it's sixteen byte keys, and so that has been that has been interesting. We've learned some things about some radios as a result of that. Because our note info got longer by sixteen bytes. Note info was not super long, and we also discovered some things inside of note info that didn't need to be there, so we kind of gained
and lost some bytes. So our max message size is two hundred and fifty six and then when we did public key crypto, we lost I think it's twelve bytes. So with your public key crypto, you don't have to send your public key as a part of that because that get it gets distributed in the note info packets, so you don't lose the public key itself. But when we did this new crypto thing, we took the opportunity to look at it and go, man, it would be
nice if we were doing authenticated as well. So AAEAD, which basically means not only are we, you know, guaranteeing that it's encrypted, but we're guaranteeing that the bytes that you received are the bites that were sent, which.
It's kind of a Ford error correction.
It's a it's a type of error correction built into it.
Yeah.
Yeah, And so that takes up a few bites, and so I think it's about a twelve byte overhead we've got on the direct messages because of that. But oh, it is so much more secure.
Here's a question from Robert kind of STEMS.
Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna read that. Go ahead, go ahead.
You can read it probably better than I am, but I'll give it a shot.
Go ahead.
Has there any third party security app test on either the Android or iOS app yet?
We've had some people look at it, and so if you go to meshtastic dot org, there is a place where I'll try to find the exact u r O for you here in a second, but there's a place where we've had a couple of different cryptographers take a look at the system. Now that I think, I think that's been a little while since the last one really
took a detailed look at it. But if somebody is out there and wants to like let us know, I will give you the guy and tour through the codebase, and you are absolutely more than welcome to look at it and let us know if we found something. We've so we have gotten CVS. If you go to our GitHub and security there are some really cvs where people have found things and we are you know, we we believe in a ninety day disclosure where it makes sense, which I think so far has been all of them.
We get things fixed. We get fixed just absolutely as quick as we can improve you.
Yeah, that's awesome. Not a lot of companies to do that.
I definitely try to.
I used to live in cryptography. I used to do credit card processing, and that was my bread and butter.
And which is why so many credit cards get hacked these days. It's you.
Yeah, I'm out of that world. Now I'm somewhere else. I can't talk.
Your code is still out there, though, Oh it is the code, the code out there that says tank is awesome or something that's still out there somewhere.
It just says my name in every credit card transaction. Still actually the first time I admitted that.
Oh my god. Yeah.
So the fun thing, one last thing kind of square the circle on this. The fun thing that I've been looking for here recently is a crypto processor, like an I two C device that we can put on a radio that will actually store that crypto graphic key on the processor rather than on the main MCU of the device. And the thing that I've run into is apparently, in these cryptographic processors, X two five five one nine is not the popular cryptographic curve. Everybody wants to use the
NIST curves. And I've only found.
Like three of these.
One of them is in pre release, the other one you've got to sign an NDA to get to anything about it. And it's like, why why you make this so hard?
Last question on this, is there any process or slowdown dealing with encrypt ecryptinds or because the or is there that you haven't seen anything on that.
Theoretically, yes, of course you're doing you know, you're doing the X two five five one nine Diffie Helman curves for every incoming packet, well half of it, half of the curve, half of the Diffie Helman. But I've I've not I've not seen anything. I've messed around with it
quite a bit. Now, like if you were, if you were to try to do so, we've got one user that does crazy things like let's do s S h over the over the mesh like that kind of as many you know, it's many packets back and forth as you can, there's some there's some room there where we can make it better, like there's some things that are not going to be quite perfect with that.
But just for normal use no, you don't see it at all.
I mean going outside the realm of your initial use case of the device. Yes, you you like to see it evolve. But on the other hand, trying to do S S H and bring it into the internet spectrum is.
Oh, it's it's yeah, it's definitely outside of the what we what we thought of people doing it the normal use case. So Jam is going to comment on this too, I know he is, but I will say, don't do that on the default channel, and don't even do that on long fast. That belongs on short fast. So you know, again, use the the quickest bit rate that you can because anything else is just going to be terrible.
Okay, most of that is point to point right, Like it doesn't really use the match because if you did it on them, on a flooded match, it would crash everything, even on short Turbo, which is.
Actually the preset that we've put in there to do file transfer stuff.
A second, so I want to I want to ask a question because we've been going for an hour now and you guys have been great. This is awesome. I would really like to get you guys back onto another show soon.
Sure.
The the long fast and the short fast channels, that's two, and there's what six or eight of them? Long slow, short slow or something like that, So can you can you explain what those are? Just kind of like high level like if you say long fast, what is long and fast mean? And what is short and fast mean? And there's like, like I said, there's what either four or six different channels that you can choose from.
I was about to ask this, Okay.
Okay, yeah, I would like someone to explain that.
Please let me take this one.
Go ahead.
I apologize for the name the nine of them.
They're nine, Okay. I was thinking I was taking eight, but I couldn't remember. I haven't looked at it in a while, So go ahead. I'm sorry you.
No, no, no's cool. The names looked a lot better when I typed it into Google spreads.
Oh wow, Okay, then.
Out to the YEA makes sense. Let's use it, let's use it, let's use it. Right. Yeah, So there was a couple intents, right. The intent was to communicate to an uninformed audience, these are people who are coming in for the first time, Uh, what sort of range they should expect by picking a preset long range, theme range short range. One of the problems we've learned with this assumption is there is no actual definition of what long.
Medium, or right right exactly. That's that's what I I figured out myself. Okay, okay, good keep going.
And then within the elongs, we gave you an option of uh fast or slow right actual bandwidth and the actual functional difference is three dB in link budget, so you know, but it's not that much loss, but you get either more speed or less speed. Now under the hood. Uh, the reason why there was only nine of these is with Laura, you use this thing called the spreading factor. This is how much your signal is spread over your
available bandwidth. There are nine of these available to use. Okay, you can have a single frequency nine hundred two point one two three four, right, you can have that one center frequency, and using different spreading factors, you can actually use that one frequency nine different times and not have any appreciable overlap or interference on the technology. Right.
So is that like, is that like frequency hopping?
Then it's not frequency hopping. It's so Laura allows you to receive below the noise floor. When you are using different spreading factors on that exact same center frequency, all of the other use is now below the noise floor, right, so you're able to use it over and over. So part of the reason for having these different presets is to give you an abstracted term for these spreading factors.
So you could have frequency nine to two point one two three four on long fast, and you could have spreading frequency nine one nine two point one two three four on long fast, and you're able to reuse or use the available bandwidth more efficiently by overlapping the use. That was part of the contention. Now, Okay, you hit
it on the head. It's not elegant. It's it's not an easy way to communicate, uh, the the the these presets, we're thinking about just naming it by how many bits per second you have, or just just just something more tangible.
And you know, well, we had a we had a so you I don't know if you guys are familiar with the company called Spec five. They're they're down in Austin, Texas. So they did a they did a meetup down there in October called mesh Con and there was probably like twenty people there. It wasn't huge, but it was their first time. Hats off to them. Great people really Like Daniel was on the show two or three weeks ago. They I lost I lost my train of thought real quick.
But it was like they, oh, oh, I know what I was gonna say. So one of the so we had a big Q and A. At the end of they did a couple of presentations, we had a big Q and A and they're like, well, you know, people get these and they hook them up and they don't know what the settings to do and what. And I'm like, literally, and I raised my hand. I said, literally, I have bought I don't know a dozen mesh Tastic nodes Lilygo hell Tech their stuff Spec five, you know, a couple
other things and whatnot. And I'm like, I have received zero instructions on what to use and why in this whole thing. So and one of their things was, well, people get it out of the box and they just plug it up and go. They don't know how to set it up. And I'm like, well, you're not telling people how to set it up. So it's kind of one of those things where it's like and I know it's all open source. It's all like you know, sink or swim fin for yourself. You know, if you can't
understand it, go away, go go do iPhone development. I don't want to say that out loud, but you know that's what I said.
So toys for people who don't want to understand.
Yeah, toys for tots. Yeah yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm teasing your guards. I hate iPhones, but that's not your fault. So I was talking to Mike.
I don't know what about that.
Oh yeah, Mike, and he's but yeah, no, seriously. So it's kind of like it would be really cool if every mesh Tastic node or you know device that you that that is sold, came with like a QR code that said, hey, go here and figure out how the hell to set up all your stuff when you plug it up the first time. So that's that that's kind of like, you know, I because they were asking how
do we grow this community? How do how do we keep people from broadcasting long fast on m QTT with four hundred thousand nodes around him, I'm like, well, I mean I didn't know that when the thing, So you know, it's kind of I mean, it's all information that is not known by that common end user. So that was kind of my point.
So I think one thing here, I would say that there's a little bit of history here and kind of the beauty of open source. So we had the like anything, everybody kind of uses the defaults, right.
So we have mind presets here, correct.
And people use the defaults.
And what used to happen with mestastic when I first started is that you either used the default public channel and you connected up and then you saw a bunch of people, and if you weren't a ham and you weren't used to sort of rag chewing with random people that were around you, and you wanted to have your own like closed network, you switched to a private channel. And these were binary choices. You could either be on the public channel or you could be on your private channel.
And one of our users discovered that if he set the frequency slot, is the name of the setting to equal the one that is the hash that the frequency sow. It is set by the name of your channel.
If your channel doesn't have a name, which is the long fast that everyone uses, then he uses the name of the preset to create that hash, and then that hash looks at the available frequency range and says, we're I was at nine oh six for the long Fast or something like that, and that is frequently slot twenty. So somebody figured out that they could have their private channel, and then a guy named Jack in Minnesota, and he figured out he could have his primary channel where everything
was safe. Everything broadcasts on the primary channel. So one of the main things with the Laura mesh is that it's flooded and you don't want to broadcast things twice, so everything goes out over the primary channel. And then the secondary channels are either group chats or requested stuff, So you could request a position on a secondary channel, but you can't broadcast from that channel.
And so this was a pretty big change.
In fact, I kind of initially was like, is this a security hole that we have here, And it's not. It's worked out well, and so you can set up that long Fast as the secondary channel now and and kind of involve yourself in the public bench, but also have all your private channels. So that that's a thing that happened just kind of naturally via the open source that really changed the trajectory completely of mesh tasta because you can have both, and it made the public channel
much better. So it used to be people would switch around more between presets because once they left the default channel, then they weren't they weren't there anymore, and they would go to like there's a long moderate preset and media Bend one of the firmware engineers used for a long time, and it works a little farther. I'm in in Washington and there's a lot of trees and stuff. It helps me kind of fight through the trees a little bit
better and stuff. But the text messages are slower, and so when you've got more people, that extra and people are annoyed by text messages taking a long time to get their acts back and to get verification that you
got that channel. So I think the reason that they're like ninety nine percent of the people, I would say at this point are running on either long Fast or the frequency slot via long Fast in their particular region because it gives them access to the public stuff, which for disaster stuff.
And emergencies and.
Just like you said, seeing if somebody's in town nearby you doing stuff like in Helene, I have sold a bunch of these solar notes that you see behind me to.
Kind of a bunch of small communities in North.
Carolina for like, I don't know, a year and a half, and I got a fantastic message from one of them and says, hey, we've been without power for four days. The entire infrastructure went down, and me and all ten of us that bought these radios have just been perfectly communicating with each other while having.
Zero that's awesome cell service or whatever running.
And one of the beauties is is when all the rest of the noise drops down in an emergency and meanstastic works fantastically well, right, so there's no more, there's none, none of the things that cause congestion when everybody is playing affected emergency, right, And that people are more careful of emergency to not be sending tests because they're right, they're pulled and don't have power, and so they want to, you know, kind of carefully use that.
So and the the the underlying purpose is some people are going to disagree with with me when I say this, but that's okay. I've got a bigger YouTube channel than they do, so I'm kidding a little bit a little bit. I said that for Frank's benefit. I said that, no, I am I. The purpose of ham radio, okay, is to is to communicate, is to send messages back and forth. That's the purpose of hand radio, That's the purpose of
GMRSCB and everything else too. So mesh tastic if you have And I interviewed several guys from the Heleene or from the North Carolina eastern Tennessee area that assisted in clean up efforts after Hurricane Helen. Ham Rado played a huge part in that, huge part in that, and we talked about mesh Tastic on that live stream a little bit. And if you are able to use mesh tastic or anything to communicate with your community post a natural disaster, post some sort of disaster, that is a win in
my opinion. I don't really care what route you take to communicate. Communication. Opening the lines of communication is the point, that is the goal, That is the end game. Can you communicate with your neighbor down the street, someone across town, and someone in another state? Yes or no? Can you do this yes or no? If you can, you have won. I don't really care how you do it. And even if even if that is done via starlink and the internet.
If you if you're tornado if if right, if if if if a hurricane or tornado come through your area and tore up everything and you have like, oh, I have a star link in a bag in my r V or in my garage that I put in my RV and then you put up after the fact and you're like, oh, I'm on the internet. Now that's a win. That's the win. I don't really care what it is. So communication is the key. So that's I think that's awesome that you're you're talking about post Hurricane Helene and
mesh tastic. That's great because that was one of the topics we talked about with the guys out there in that area after the fact, and I think it's I think it's a very good thing. You called that Garth, You called that that solar system behind you. Would you call it again?
They're just solar No, I don't. They don't have a fantastic name or anything.
But who makes it.
Me and you make it? Okay?
Yeah, So if you go to Garth VH dot com, you'll you'll get to my empsy store.
We're they're for sale.
Oh I know, Oh, I know, Okay, you are yeah, yeah, no, I know. Yeah. I bought one of your one of the little notes, and it I had it setting outside for like three months and it was fine, and then it developed a leak, and it leaked and ruined the border.
I have a question here, I've seen in the check.
So I'm gonna I'm gonna. I'm gonna hit you up, Garth.
Go ahead, Frank, what is a mestastic solution?
Yeah?
I saw that a couple of times too. I'm wondering that myself.
Who wants to tackle that? I can't entertain you.
Let me take this one, so so meshtastic. We are an open source project, right we we're a collective of people. Last time I checked, and this was about three weeks ago, I look at numbers, uh, five hundred and thirty people have contributed to this project. It is in incredible worldwide effort. And you know, of these three hundred and fifty, there's about fifteen people who are responsible for ninety five percent of the work. Those are the Those are people who
are we call the project leads, the project admins. We are the people who not only contribute the code, but you know, keep the systems up and running for us. This has almost turned into a full time job, right. We all jobs on are imagined, but we're supporting you know, numbers forty thousand new devices per month coming up on our network, right, actually ridiculous, And we've we've seen manufacturers are actually making money on Meshtastic, right, assemblers are making money.
Fantastic And yet we're spending a lot of time on this project, and we have families to feed as well, right, And so Fantastic Solutions is a way for us to explore ways so we can take this thing which is a hobby and actually be able to focus ourselves fully on it. And we want to do it in a way where we're adding value to the open source project, right, not taking anything away because we are open source for us, right, this is our passion, and we have discussions with many
of the manufacturers out there. We're in negotiations right now, and the support we're getting is absolutely absolutely fabulous, right, So excellent in Chorge for you. We're trying to turn our hobby into something which we can feed our family.
That's what we're doing here, right, Yeah, capitalism baby, So it's a good thing. Garth, please please, I have if I dug through my email I could find it. Give me the link to your Etsy store please in the chat in the zoom chat.
So, yeah, I've bought a past GitHub link.
Yeah, correct, that's a GitHub thing.
So jam people were.
Jam wanted me to share the link to the mesh tastic YouTube channel. I'm gonna put that in the chat right now. You guys, go check that out Garth v h dot com. Does that take you too? Yeah? Okay, So I bought a couple of notes from Garth a while back, and Garth I didn't realize that we Honestly, I didn't realize that was the same dude, So cool man, uh, I did? I bought some When I first got into Meshtastic, I was poking around Etsy. James at quirky q RP. He has an Etsy store, so I poke around his
story all the time. Ham Radio stuff doesn't have anything to do with meshtastic. But but I found some Metsy stuff about mestastic nodes and I bought a couple of your nose and and they've been they've been pretty good so far. So so go check out Garth's Etsy channel there Garth vh dot com name okay cool?
Oh okay, okay, Yeah, I could get it to load.
Uh, it doesn't have an HTTP in front of it, so let me do this this way.
I just typed it out probably and I checked that it was it was redirecting, but I didn't.
It's it's totally fun. I got it, got it, I got it. And now Garth is sold out. Yeah yeah, one thing. One thing about being on my channel. Boys, you will sell out. I'm sorry, is just the way it is. So get to get get to manufacturing. That's all I gonna say. So, yeah, good, Okay, Frank, do we have any more questions?
Oh? My god? What can we talk about?
I have a everything? Everything?
Oh?
I like, we didn't we did not. We did not get through half of the questions that Robert sent or the topics that Robert sent me. But all that and we've been going for an hour and twenty minutes. All that means is I need to bring you guys back on. So we'll do that. Well, I'll email you after this is over. Go ahead.
Frank Paul is asking, uh, what news is on the ATAC and mesh.
Uh So A guy named Nick in Florida has written a fantastic a TAC plug in which has really made using a TAC with Android. Tactical Awareness Kit is a US government made tactical software that is being used being used extensively by uh SAR and police teams in the US and METASTA. It is kind of IP heavy at its core, so it's expecting that you have cellular service UH and Mestasta can either use the plug in and you can then message and provide have it uses the phone for location.
UH.
Our GPS is are great, but your phone GPS is better steel band, it has the extra it has the extra location information from cell towers, all of that. So for really precise location stuff, your phone is really a great tool. And so we have a Mestastic plugin for attack and then we have a role called the attack
Tracker role. UH So within attack you can have devices that are purely to track the location of a vehicle, an animal, whatever it is, a person and so you can use that role and that will use the GPS on the Mestastic device. And then I think there are there's a number of tax servers, and I think the integration from those servers has allowed for Meshtastic to be
available in eye TAC, which is the Apple version. One of the reasons that I and these are these are kind of built by government contractors and stuff, so the level of complexity and set up and stuff can can be kind of intent sometimes. But the Eye Tech tools were built partially because has really good.
Three D mapping stuff and so more buildings and urban stuff.
The the Apple Apple mapping tools are really fantastic, and so I TAC was built to kind of helps our teams in the US specifically check check the website to make sure using these is legal in your country, I would say.
And I met a guy at mesh Con at Spec five who claims he is an a TAC expert, so I've asked him to come on the channel. We're going to be doing a live stream about that soon.
I'm very tech.
I'm just saying, man, I went to install ATAG very early in my mestastic career, and I pull up the Android app to install it, and it's like from the US government and here's all the permissions and it's like every possible permission on Android that app once and I'm like, nope, nope, I don't want to get bad.
Well, you know what, you know, that's why I have about seven I'm not joking. Android device yeah, so yeah, yeah, don't put it on your main device, just put it on something else. So yeah, attack is a cool it's a cool application. It does a lot of stuff. But yes, I'm I'm with you on that, Jonathan.
I mean, well, yeah, I'm talking about the government. They will allow you to give you pages or for us to give them pages and pages of set up documents that big, and they will accept it as long as everything's started.
Yeah, it's it's it's death by PowerPoint, except it's death. It's death by documentation with the USK.
As long as it's documented and how to get it to work, then they will accept it. But anyways, here's the question that you asked right down earlier, and I do like it. Trey is asking make sure to ask or talk about clients versus router nodes why most people should not use router mode.
Yes, so, so there's there's three options. Correct me if I'm wrong. There's three options. When you're going to to there's two router and client, or there's there's router, there's repeater in the client. You're right, Okay, we got so the the default mode is is client and then there's router and repeater. I think so.
There's there's a there's a bunch more than that. Actually, so there's client mute, there's client hidden, there's tracker, there's lost and found. But most people want to just use client because when you when you say I'm a router, what what you're saying is I am one hundred foot in the air. That's really what router says. That is I am I am the node that has the best signal to noise ratio, like in the entire town, and so I want all of the traffic to go through me.
And so if you put a node on top of your car and you set that, your card node will then try to route all that traffic, but it's not actually in a good place to do.
It's not a router though. Okay, yeah, so a repeat So but a router has a router of courts itself, but a repeater does not. Is that correct?
Repeter has two repeater has two of our modules in it.
Period.
It has the routing module which sends messages around, and then the admin module, so you can potentially do some administration of settings, but it does not have any of the other stuff. So it's just a repeater. And when you say it's not and it's not really on your mesh. Right, you won't sit it in the phone app.
Yeah, you won't see it, right, it's just repeating traffic. Yes, yeah, it's invisible.
Yeah.
Okay, So so when should so? So people should use router if it's on a very tall location.
We're saying mountain right now, we're saying you use a you don't use a router on the top of your house.
Or so if you if you're like me and you you've talked to the guy that owns the grain elevator into town to let you put a note up there, you can sit that one to router. But if it's just the top of your house, it probably doesn't need to be in router.
So router should be So the top of your house should be a clienter or a Peter then pliant client a client okay.
And there's one more of these roles that I really want to plug people on because I didn't know about it for the longest time, but it's really useful, and that's the client mute. And so if you're like me and you've got seventeen different nodes that you may have on at the same time, you don't want all of
those repeating every packet. You really want one or maybe two in your house to be a client and you want the rest of them to be on client mute because you only really want one node repeating everything.
So what does what does client mute do if I node to client mute, What does it do differently than a client router a client node?
It does not repeat packets it sends, it receives, It does not rebroadcast any of them.
Okay, so it's a zero hot thing.
Yes, yeah, essentially you could look at it that way.
Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay. Cool.
And in fact, we've talked internally, like half jokingly about renaming client mute to client and then renaming client to client router because some many people were a little irritated at us for when client router went away because they didn't understand what it was doing.
It's really wine, It's just it's terminology that you can really kind of. It's semantics is what it is.
So we gotta we've got blog.
Go ahead, we got a blog post about this. Actually it's fantastic dot org slash blog. And then it's I think it's actually the top one the latest one choosing the right device roll and it goes into the nitty gritty about all of these.
Okay, so I'm gonna yeah, uh, Garth put that in the chat here. I'm putting that in the live chat guys for the in the YouTube chat. Go check that out. Mesh tastic dot or port slash blog por slash Choosing the right device roll, right device.
Role, goodret the device when you select the device. Uh, if you pick router and you literally are not on the top of the mountain, if you literally are not on top of a tower, a grain elevator. Right, if you aren't absolutely best placed, you might have the best intentions, but you're actually degrading the network you're on. Right, I really want to highright this. Right. If you like this and you're not the absolute best of the best, you have just harmed that network flat out.
Okay, because you're but if you're the only one, if you're the only one in that area, then you'd be okay with that, right.
If you're the one who set up and managed that network, right, do whatever you want?
Well, yeah, if you want to all.
Play nice, you're you're on a public group. You're part of the the you think of the community first before you think of.
Yourself and the reason why it harms the network. So let's dive into just for a minute, the nitty gritty of the way that the flood routing works is if I hear a packet, I am going to set like a random time er just a few milliseconds, and if nobody else repeats it, I will repeat that packet. If I hear somebody else repeat it, then I figure my device doesn't have to repeat it, so it's not going
to repeat it. What the router role does is it minimizes what that random time is going to be so that the router by default is going to repeat it first. But if the router is not in a good spot, then it may repeat it before the one that actually should be does repeat. And therefore, you know, the router that's actually up on top of the mountain doesn't because
it's now hearded on the airwaves twice. So that's why you can actually literally really harm you can really hurt your your messhes spread as far as being able to get packags out.
Gotcha?
Interesting?
Okay, makes sense? Makes sense? Okay, good?
All right?
What else Frank.
Jeff is asking can there be priority for emergency messages versus non emergency messages allow for a high priority to pass during when there's a a bunch of data on their congestion. That's the word of congestion.
Yay.
You need to ask yourself what network are you actually on? If you're on a public network of our defaults, it's going to be so congested that used for an emergency emergency services, it can be difficult. Right in those cases, you really want is to have that emergency service provider have their own network. And with Mechetastic, it's really easy to have your own network. Right. If you have your own network, you've now carved out a portion of the
band just for you, just through through the cryptography. Right, So you've now set this up. You can set it up ahead of time. You can set it up, you know, months ahead. We're talking to this couple of cities doing this. We're talking to companies actually creating these disaster preparedness kits. All just set up their own network using Meghtastic. That's easily deployable and if you are in emergency situation, you are on your own network.
Now.
The other half of this question is what if I am having a in emergency on a you know, congested network, right, your device will try to send out that message multiple times, and as the network gets more and more congested, our quality of service algorithms will start to reduce non priority messages. Right, So even if the network is congested, it's very likely your message will go through.
Yeah, So we do actually already have like priority of numbering at prior memoring system and text messages get the highest priority. So there are some things built in there to try to make those go through even if other
things won't because of congestion. The other thing that we got to be careful and we've talked about some of these things internally, and we want to be careful about like pitching things directly for emergency use, because we can't make any guarantees about that, right, Like we're not garment. We're not the SOS radio where you hit the button and the paramedics are going to come get you because you paid for that. Like that's not like you can
set that up yourself. You can have a system of buddies where your buddy is listing for it and it's going to come try to help you, but like that's not something that Meshtastic is in anywhere close to position to provide, and we want to make sure that everybody understands that, right.
Yeah, And we are doing a lot more scaling algorithms, so if you're seeing a lot of nodes, then it will slow down the priority of some of the things that are less important and focus on routing, text, messages and discovery, right.
And that a lot of that is stuff we learn from places like def Coon and ham Vention. We saw where those you know, not as necessary messages were causing the problem, like neighbor info. Neighbor info has been terrible. It's the greatest idea. Hey, here's all the nodes that I am in direct connection with. Turns out it takes a lot of bites for sending that across the network every five minutes or ten minutes or whatever.
All right, we've been going for about an hour and a half. This this has been great, guys, This has been great. I really appre shied you guys be on here. A lot of a lot of interaction in the chat, a lot of questions, a lot of people watching, So I really appreciate you guys being on here. I do want to bring you guys back on in January. We're going to talk about a custom firmware for HAMCS in Orlando in February. So we're going to do that. Let me switch this right here and go. I have one
last question I want to ask you myself, Frank. Did we get to all the questions in the chat?
I got a couple more, but for time wise, it's it's good. It's good.
Okay. I want to ask and this maybe this is one of the questions in the chat. This is a great text messaging service right now, What if any plans are there for sending sending memes over meshtash So that'd be that'd be kind of cool. There's a thing in ham Radio called slow Scan TV that's basically sending memes
over the air. It's really fun. But like, what kind of expanded things are on the horizon or have been talked about besides just sending text messages, any kind of multimedia voice recorded messages that you can record and then hit send, or low res images or something like that. There's anything like that on the drawing board for you guys.
So mash tastic we are a fully contributed driven organization, right we are open source. What we have in place now is a robust network transport layer, right, that's really what it is. What are the applications on top of that is text messaging. One of the applications on top of that is sensor networks telemetry, one of the we have all these different applications. Someone has actually implemented codec to over mesh tastic.
Really yes, oh.
Though it only.
Works on the two point four it does any more bandwidth, but it does work.
Right, nice, very cool.
Someone has has implemented the z modemuh file protocol on top of mesh tastic. There's a lot of things capable there. So if someone is it out there that wants to say, I want to integrate sending memes on the Android app, huff to garth, we'll figure out.
How it sounds like mess tastes started to just become so ubiquitous. Is like, you can use it as a modem just for then once it becomes a modem data pass device.
It's a communications tool. Just create a channel called hashtag memes and put all the nyos in there and just to leet those guys alone, and then the rest of us can communicate via long fast and whatnot. So it's cool.
But something else so on this on this topic, something else that again people from our community have done, and there's several projects doing. This is both board systems. Several people have looked at fantastic and gone this is basically the old bulletin board system. And so we've got a couple of different projects for people are working on too and are making it work, and you know that's getting more sophistic game as time goes by.
Yeah. So there's a guy in the chat tonight called his name is Rob. He goes by Digital Rancher. He created a BBS for us at where were we maybe uh maybe Belton or something some local show, some local Henry system be a bulletin board system BBS bullet system. So I know, but I mean it's it's it's it was a it was a cool system to have on
the on the meshchastics system. So it's it works. It's then there's new stuff and spect five is doing like Solitaire over mesh and uh yeah, like it's like Tic Tac they have a Tic Tac toe game and Solitaire and something. Yeah, like like little very simple games that you can play your like Words of Friends type thing over the mesh, so it's it's kind of neat there, but.
And low bandwidth stuff like two of the things that I've worked on with Mestastic from a both graphical and low bandwidth thing is that we use so we convert your node number to a color, as I'm sure you've seen, and so each node has either on Android a little pill or on iOS a circle, and then within those you can set your short name to an emoji that's
less than four characters. And on Android and iOS these emojis are very high resolution now, but they're a four by character and so that's a way that we can add a lot of graphical interest and memes and and fun stuff to both the name of your node and the short name which shows up in that small colored either pill or circle there, and you can have you know, it's it's efficient for the mesh and doesn't take up
any extra space, right, And that's add some things. So there's lots of interesting stuff like that that you can do with little low bandwidth mesh with just numbers and emoji. There's four thousand plus emoji now, so there's there's a ton of options.
So awesome.
I'm not going to ask that question never.
Ask it.
No, no, no, I'll ask you off stream, off stream, okay, okay, but I think that's awesome. E mooji is over mestastic.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, especially if there's a middle finger in there, because I'm I don't.
Know anything Nicode right.
So Jonathan, JM and Garth thank you so much. This has been awesome. This has been really really great. I would love to get you guys back on maybe next month, but if not, then absolutely by January to just talk about the state of things we should set up in every other month thing. Just because mestastic is is constantly growing new firmware, new features, new nos and whatnot. I would love to, uh to get you guys back on constantly and just talk about this kind of stuff. Because
we didn't touch the questions that Ben sent me. I think we went through like maybe a third of them tonight.
So when you're gonna give me the reins and me and Jonathan will just geek out.
You get dev guys that break everything. I don't want to give you that do that on your chiin.
Dev guys will break everything. Ye who fixes your bugs?
You know, it's just that's not you Frank, you can't.
Yeah, hey, if you misspelled the same time every way, well I don't care.
That's probably a good point.
Yeah, the programmers laugh about that one.
Yeah, get us on in a month, because we'll be a month ahead of Chinese New Year. And when you do it January one, people can't get radios.
By Yeah, that's true.
But like the.
China shut down.
To two, well two weeks, it slows the way down. Yeah, yeah, it's two weeks. It's a two week Holladay. But then they're behind for a month after that because of catch up. Yeah. Okay, so so mid mid December.
Sure, sure, okay, okay, good, you're on.
Okay, So I've been trading emails with Rob and you guys. Email me all three of you guys, email me k C five HBB at gmail dot com. Send me an email and I'll put the four of you plus Frank on on. We'll get an email chat going. I would love to get you guys back on this is there's so much information and we touched on ten percent of it. So seriously, it's it's like it's huge and and it's growing. It's constantly growing, like I said a minute ago. So it's I would love to do it like in every
other month thing with this. This would be great. So I appreciate you guys time tonight so awesome. Yeah, and uh that Jonathan and JM. You guys need to plan to come to Orlando in February for him casion.
I'm gonna be I'm going to be in Florida in February for a security conference actually, so I have to see if that lines up at all.
Yeah. Interesting, it's usually the weekend after Valentine's Day somewhere in there, like the third weekend something like that. So but if not, Dayton in I mean Spec five is talking too. Spec five wants to Uh He's like, hey, what what ham Fist should we go to? I'm like, go to Orlando, go to Dayton, Good Huntsville. So they wanted they want to go and actually set up a mesh tastic table at these shows, which is a great idea, by the pay, It's a fantastic ideas. Yeah, yeah, I
can help. I can help you guys on a booth cost I can I can pitch in on that because yeah, that's that's a booth.
Be wary.
He will be there in story stuff all convention.
No, I won't. No, I have a can't cited dayton I don't care about that. No, this story, the boots boot Yeah, the booths that dayton are kind of expensive, but it's well worth it because it's a huge audience for sure.
Yeah.
So once again, guys, thank you for tonight. This has been great, excellent information. Really appreciate you all's time tonight, and we're gonna do this again. I'll email you guys this week, uh today, what Sunday? I email you guys next week and just say, hey, let's set something up for middle of December and do this against excellent, excellent topic tonight.
All right, okay, appreciate it.
All right, Mesh Harder is that what would says Harder? Yes, yes, yes.
Hashtag hashtag Mesh Harder. Yes, that is a thing. Yeah it is now, it is now man.
Yeah. Yeah, good dude.
Thanks guys, appreciate way wave. Goodbye, there we go. Got something, Oh, Frank, I'm sorry, Go ahead, Frank, Yeah, you want to talk about something, Go ahead real fast.
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