This is the Specter from Spec five.
It is an all in one turn key solution for a mesh Tastic node that you carry with you.
And that's the size of it right there. So let's talk about that today.
I went to mesh Con in October of twenty twenty four down at the Spec five facility and it was a good It was a small event, it was some good information and it was but it was the first year they did it, and I hope they do it again. Since then, I've had Daniel from Spec five on the live stream and he talked to us about a lot of stuff that Spec five is working on. Spec five is a manufacturer. They take existing mesh Tastic devices, build cases for them, build systems, form and that kind of thing.
They're working on some new firmware as well. So this is the Spec five specter. You can see how This is my three x three patch here that I've got and my Android smartphone is right here, so I've got it zoomed in pretty close, so you guys can see it a little bit better. We'll get some more close ups of it. You can see that's basically a held Tech V three case that's inside of there. This is the two buttons on the bottom of the case right there, that push buttons on the actual board, and then on
top of it is an Android. I don't even know what kind of Android device this is, but this is an Android. This is a full smartphone from Android. It's a full smart phone from Android.
We can turn this on here and go there.
It's got the Meshtastic application right there pre installed. I didn't put this in so you see right there, it's called S five Spector. Of course, you can rename that anything you want to. You can rename a short name. Region is US. That's the QR code that you can scan to join a room, create a customized room, whatnot. It's got a map right there. Of course, these are other nodes that it's seeing right now. This right here,
this was from several days ago. That's my truck node though, is that is It's another Spec five It's called a Spec five beacon, I think, is what I have in my truck right now. It's got a small solar panel and it do another video about that soon. And then of course we've got the long fast room there and I need to add my customized rooms to it, but I haven't done that yet. So we can go back
here to the main menu. It's got these check tastic Now, these are applications that have been developed by Spec five, and there are games you can play. So it got mesh Chess, check Tastic, so I think it's Checkers, and then's Spec five mesh tastic something right there.
What does that say?
There's different games you can play over the mesh to, you know, just kind of keep yourself entertained to whatnot.
So kind of some cool propriety.
It's not proprietary necessarily, but Spec five did write the applications for all that. And then we got your settings and gallery whatnot, camera, calendar, file manager, got chrome. I put chrome on there. There's my photo the play store and download anything from the play Store you want to.
So there's my photos right there. I haven't connected that yet. That's fine. I haven't really.
Done much with this yet. But a couple of the guys I know who had this. Someone put wind link on it, which I thought was a good idea. You could put APRS droid on it. You can use it for you put various ham radio type applications on this and it'll be a good addition to your pack or to just your your edc carry that will enable Meshtastic but also have other hand radio type applications on it. There's the buttons up down buttons on it for the
volume and whatnot. The one drawback about it that I will say is that it has two charge ports for it, so you charge the phone and the mesh Tastic board back here independently. They are both USBC, so you can charge them via the same cable, but they're charging one end of time, so you might want to look for some sort of splitter cable that has two USB C ports on it where you can charge everything at the same time. But just because you charge the phone up
doesn't mean you're charged the Meshtastic radio. So that's that's one kind of drawback I think, you know for it, kind of like that I don't know they've got this cut out here because the.
Camera is usable on the phone.
This is your power power button and screen on off button, and it's just and of course it comes with this SMA antenna that you can change out. You can put a longer intenna on it. You can put an external magmunt on your vehicle and hook it up that way. I have an external magmunt on my vehicle, but I have another radio that I use for.
That right now.
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The antenna.
The antenna that sticks out is a little bit like it's so small that you're you're tempted to put it in your pocket when you're walking around places, and if you look, you can kind of see the antenna's little bent right there, because I put it in my pocket and the antenna got bent. So take the antenna off if you want to.
Put it in your pocket, or just don't put it in your pocket.
I do wish it had some sort of belt clip or maybe some sort of molly case for it. There might be a molly case you can find that you can put that in and stick it as a clip on the back of your your backpack or your go bag or your your man pack or whatever something like that.
So that's one another drawback.
Two drawbacks with it that I've found is that it's independent charging of the phone and the meschastic device. The phone itself is small, so it has a small battery. This battery will last about a day, okay, And then you know, for what it is, that's not bad. It's not bad. For what it is, it's not great. I know my was gonna show you this is my z fold four. So that's how much smaller it is than the z fold four. In fact, it's even smaller with the antenna than my z fold four is. So it's small,
it's lightweight, it's compact, it's full Android. I forget, I even forget what version of Android is running. Let's look at that real quick. So this is running Android nine. I kind of thought it was in a newer version of Android than that. It is running a custom build called Servo and it's on v one dot dot twenty twenty three twelve fifteen servos, so it's probably it actually probably needs to be updated because that's from December of last year, so there might be an update for it.
I'll have to check that later. But it is Android nine, so I was I thought it was Android twelve. Honestly, I thought that's what it was. But it's just Android nine. But I don't know if the version of Android is older because this is an older device, or and maybe you can update it.
I don't know.
I don't know if the memory on this device. I don't know if it'll justify a newer version of Android. But I mean, the long and short of it is, just don't put any personal information on this, okay. Put create yourself a new Google account with a play store, access something that's random that doesn't have all the rest of your Google stuff, Download and install whatever apps you want to on this, and use it just for a ham radio off grid device to use wind link APRS droid.
It's got bluetoo so you can connect it to like a moby linked TNC or the d KME with D seventy five that has a built in TNC and you can use APRS droid with that.
In fact, that might be a fun video. I might try to do something like that soon.
And it's just it's a very like I said, it was an all inclusive, all just turnkey solution for mesh tastic right there.
Spec five is the company. Specter is the name of the device.
I will put a link in the description below for that, so go check that out and thanks for watching today.