Solarpunk. Ultra-low-powered whisper radio telecommunications across the globe. People baking ICs in their basements. Hardware that can be repaired for decades, disaster-proof Operating Systems. Text-only protocols, heavily immune to the ad industry. What a time to be alive!
I wonder if some of the nerdiest corners of the internet from nowadays do not make the exciting 90s pale in comparison (all this looks like aspects of a potential renaissance).
As hobbies, they all sound amazing. Even though, or perhaps due to their apparent futility. "Secession from the broadcast" and "the knowledge" come to mind. A possibility, among many others.
ICs are not the problem, this can be decoded with a soundcard within the pc... usually the antennas are more problematic, atleast for urban areas, because you need 2x5.5m long dipole to use those frequencies (13mhz), so doing it in dense, urban enviroments is hard (unless you have roof access).
Otherwise, with lora and a lot shorter ranges, you can create mesh communication networks easily, with $20-$30 of hardware (already assembled) - eg. https://meshtastic.org/
Does anybody happen to know of off the shelf LoRa radios that I could use to link two Linux machines with a minimum of tinkering? Preferably with connectors for external antennas. Preferably usable as LoRaWAN gateways down the line, or perhaps even simultaneously.
Yes, I was thinking IP for simplicity's sake. Just lightweight control packets and the occasional SSH session. I think I've seen references to people doing that.
I was thinking off the shelf concentrator cards would be easier if two of them could communicate with each other in a P2P fashion, and if that was supported by common software.
Is that packet forwarding daemon the thing that is generally used on all LoRaWAN gateways? Like if I got a Mikrotik wAP LR9, would I expect it to be running that? Or better yet, if I plugged a miniPCIe (USB) R11e-LR9 into my own Linux machine, could I expect it to just work with that gateway software?
It seems the basic interface is serial links with AT commands, so perhaps the compatibility issues are trivial once you start playing around with this stuff. It's just hard to tell by reading the overview docs because they seem to be geared towards the LoRaWAN system.
I wonder if some of the nerdiest corners of the internet from nowadays do not make the exciting 90s pale in comparison (all this looks like aspects of a potential renaissance).
As hobbies, they all sound amazing. Even though, or perhaps due to their apparent futility. "Secession from the broadcast" and "the knowledge" come to mind. A possibility, among many others.