The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Meshtastic, A Masterclass

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

🚨 Grid down? No problem. In Ep 487, Chin Gibson's Meshtastic master class turns LoRa radios into a unbreakable mesh for off-grid texts – 100+ miles, no license needed! From setup pitfalls to solar repeaters, it's your SHTF comms blueprint. Blending Changing Earth drama with real prep: Dream, survive, thrive.Get Prepared with Our Incredible Sponsors! Survival Bags, kits, gear www.limatangosurvival.comEMP Proof Shipping Containers www.fardaycontainers.comThe Prepper's Medical Handbook Build Your Medical Cache – Welcome PBN FamilyPack Fresh USA www.packfreshusa.comSupport PBN with a Donation https://bit.ly/3SICxEq

Welcome back to the Changing Earth podcast with author Sarah F. Hathaway and co-host, Chen Gibson. Blending survival, fiction, and fact to bring you entertaining education that will help you dream, survive, and thrive. And now, here's your host, Sarah F. Hathaway and Chen Gibson. Hello, welcome back to the Changing Earth podcast. This is episode number 487. We're creeping on that 500 mark. Hey, Chin, what's up? Hey, Chin's up, y'all.

So, yeah, I got Chin roped into doing his masterclass now. He is so excited. Let me tell you. You all better make some coffee and get a comfy chair. That's right. Well, I never make it over to classes at PreperCamp. I always have my booth or teaching and getting classes. So I have one of these meshtastics and I don't even know like what to really do with it. So I know you find great value in them. Oh, so this is just a scheme to get me to finally teach you how to do it. Yeah. Because at camp I'm always running back and forth saying,

yeah, I'll be right back. I'll show you. I'll be right back. Right. I'll hook it up. I'll show you. No. Yeah. It was all part of my diabolical plan to get you to teach me how to use this thing. So, yeah. Well, played. Yeah. We got some good change in earth news. But if we don't get to it, we don't get to it. Well, it is a big deal, I guess. We lost a lot of lives in October. It was a crazy month. So we'll try and get there. But yeah. So my baby chickens are finally producing. I'm getting like almost a dozen eggs a day now again.

Wow. That's crazy. Do you like freeze dry them or? No, you know what I do? I give them to my neighbors and like my martial arts instructor. And, uh, yeah. Real goodwill. Yeah.

It's a great way to get to know your neighbors. We got some new ones down the street. And then we make a lot of like deviled eggs. And yeah. It's all, we eat a ton of egg meals, custards, and whatnot. And so I've been living life high on the hog. Fletch is training to be the chef now. So he's like, oh, the food is so good.

I'm not even kidding. He does a great job. So I'm a happy mom. Yeah. My game plan is, though, to make it so I have a food source for my chickens so that it is self-sustainable without having to buy so much. feed because that would be the issue you know grid down that kind of thing so we're getting there we got plans i always got plans right yeah how about you you getting uh the trees all cleaned up from holline finally or no actually i haven't done much with that since i got back yeah no yeah

no i need to get back out there what a mess i was uh there was still a lot of scars um there was a lot of clean up when we're there in September, so it was good to see everybody kind of coming together. And you guys have that crawling bush that pretty much took care of a lot of the erosion worries. Yeah. Uh-huh. What is that? God, I can't remember the name of it. Cuttsu?

Cuttsu. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe in this case, it's a good thing because usually I know it's not. Yeah, I don't think I have any of my property yet, but dang, I see it when I go into town. Yeah. So, big concerns right now.

My gosh, my mom's out traveling, and we have all this stuff going with the snap benefits. Have you seen anything kick off with that yet? I haven't, but... I did a couple quick searches and haven't seen anything yet. At this point, I don't think that, like, I think balances are still lingering, right? So there's been some interesting numbers. I heard that they're not, it's not like one day at all drops. they roll out so

across the whole nation it's not like one day that all gets funded and then oh one day it's not there anymore thank goodness I mean that would be horrible if everybody that had one was cut up on the same day. I think some states are going to be able to fund it for a little bit too so hopefully

that will kind of splatter the fall out from it I was looking at because I watch valutainment a lot and he was showing the oh yeah the numbers the ethnicities of the people that are on those benefits? And I was like,

whoa, whoa. I thought that was for Americans. I mean, I don't know. And the answer is not to figure out how to continually fund this SNAP program. The answer is how to educate people to get off it. Right. And how to get our communities

and people used to being charitable again, using our food banks, using the resources that are there to be able to feed these people instead of the same. Yeah, but it just, it's not a long-term solution. You know, and they have problems like, or they have programs like Wix and stuff. And when you're on Wix, you're funded, though. Right.

You can only buy cheese. You can only buy milk. You can only buy, like, certain things that are literally for, like, sustaining you in a healthy way while you're pregnant or milking, you know, or, you know, breastfeeding. So, you know, I don't understand. understand why the SNAP benefits can't do something similar to that where you're It is to some extent, right? It's just not as tight as what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. So crazy stuff. We'll see what happens. You know, I've been in the preparedness community for over a decade. Oh, gosh, you know, even before that. And so many things there. Oh, this is coming. That's coming. This is coming. I know. Right. So, yeah, you kind of learn to like take it with a grain of salt. make sure that your preps are always on point so you're never going oh well i need to get to the store before you know you should have be that person uh especially if you've been listening to my show

for over a decade but uh you know make sure that you're short up and i would definitely recommend a heightened situational awareness when you're at grocery stores and whatnot we were telling both of our moms that they need to be absolutely we don't go unless you have to until see how that shakes out. And if you go into a town or a social environment, just keep an eye on everything. Don't be afraid to just put it down and walk out. Fail out if you have to. Like, no shame in the game. Much better to be safe than sorry at this point. And, you know, when you're when you're not eaten, that's mixed for some really difficult times. Yeah. The other thing that I saw that kind of concern me was, you know, so. So, you know, so.

a group of people comes into your town to hit up your grocery store or whatever and then all of the you know sheep dog good spirited people go well I'm going to go protect my store my uh you know local Walmart or whatever well first of all you know they have insurance for those kind of things as a business we don't like to see it happen for sure I know you want to protect your town but on the whole um you know I hate to say it this way, but the Democrats are getting out of jail way faster than conservatives.

Yeah. So if you get an altercation, you go to jail, it's not good. Yeah, I don't, I think your chances would be that good pretending a bag of rice and a carton of milk.

Right. If you're protecting somebody's life. Absolutely. That's a difference. Or home, that's one thing. But I don't know if you're, you know, unless it's your business, right so just be careful be watchful because you know we don't want to be in the wrong place

at the wrong time and then you're not there yeah because if you get taken out into the legal system you're not there for your family right exactly and it's an expensive journey to be on so everybody just keep that in mind yeah all right so enough forewarning let's jump into some mistastic so that chain can teach me how to use this thing all right Okay, so the funny thing about this class is this class, the very first time I taught it was the day after Helene hit North Carolina. And we were all huddling around and I pulled this. We actually got everything back, got the tents put back up, got generator power on, and we could do our classes. So I show this slide and I had a full class, a full tent.

And then I, the very next slide I showed was this. And I asked anybody in the class, does anybody have this on their phones right now? Of course, everybody did. We all had one of those chuckles that isn't really a funny chuckle. Right. I wish I had it. That started my very first class teaching moustastic. Ironic.

So, yeah. So, you know, what do you do when, when you don't have anything? now since that first class I've learned comms is just like anything else in prepping comms is built on a pace plan you know you have backups to your backups to your backups so in you know just like you have backups to you know home security or backups to transportation you need to have backups to how you're going to communicate and get information from outside your circle, you know, your direct location. So this pace plan is my pace plan. It doesn't have to be your place plan because you have to decide what you have to use and what works good in your

location. But for me, my primary, my everyday use is a cell phone. It's just easy to use. After that, both my wife and I have licensed for ham and we have license for GMRS. radios. So that's our alternate. Every time I go into town, I have my cell phone in my pocket, and I have my walkie-talkie, which does ham and gym or us. So I can get, I can talk to my radio, my wife, buy radio if the cell phones don't work. After that, we use mesh-tastic. And after that, you're going to want to have plans in place to rally in person someplace. But that, that's kind of, just think about, don't depend. on your cell phone. I've got a scanner app on my cell phone or I've got Zulu, Zello on my cell phone

that walkie talking app. Those are great and I use them. I use all that stuff. But if you don't have internet or you don't have cell phone service up, your phone is just where you keep your documents and your, you know, your prepper books, right, that you can pull up. It's no longer going to be, it's going to be for reference. It's no longer to be a communication device. Okay. So, and what the class is about is mesh-tastic, right? So what is mesh-tastic? It's a secure way of communication, communicating. It's long distance. It uses low power and it's open source, which is, that's a real geeky avenue to go down. But basically it says it's, right now it's free to use and you don't need a license. And, um, Being open source, techie people can go in and look at the code and make sure there's no backdoors or any spyware, stuff like that. So that's why it's good to be open source. And it runs on multiple platforms.

So if you have a cell phone, you can use it that runs Apple, if you have one that runs Android, if you have a tablet that runs either of those software, if you have a computer that runs Windows or Mac or Lenox, all those things can connect into Meshtastic. and communicate amongst each other. So it's not like if you have a walkie-talkie that's Motorola that only does Motorola ham, you can't talk to somebody that only has a walkie-talkie that does, you know, like a cobra, FRS walkie-talkie you got at Walmart. They won't talk to each other. Here you can across all the different. Yeah.

So this shows basically how mesh-tastic works. Yes, you can use. a phone. Yes, you can use a tablet or a computer, like I said. But the only thing that the phone tablet computer is being used for is basically your monitor and so you can see, like your TV, so you can see what messages are being sent and received and your keyboard. So you can actually type. But the mesh text use what they call a node. Basically, that's just a radio. It's a small little radio that you carry that connects to your phone by Bluetooth and your phone again becomes the screen and the keyboard and the node is what is the radio that sends signals out to the universe right

so that is what's doing all the heavy lifting that's like the remember the old desktop days you had the computer up on your desk or underneath your desk that was the brains of the computer and then you had a keyboard and a screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, when you had like your own server. Yeah. So the node is your little radio. So you'll have a node and then Sarah will have a node and then I'll have a node and then, you know, I'll have a node. So the audience has a node, I have a node and you have a note, Sarah, right?

So I can talk to you and you can talk to the audience. but the benefit of mesh-tastic is every node repeats the message. So it goes to be to you, but I really didn't want you to get the message. I wanted the audience to get the message, right? Right. So you do us a favor and you rebroadcast that message out. Right. And that's not anything like you have to do.

It's just once your node's active. Right. When your node, right. And so there's, we can deep dive this. You can set your node to repeat or not repeat. Okay. And you can set channels that are private. There's like, the nodes come with a public channel as a default channel.

And that's like channel 19 on the old CB radios, right? So anybody can talk on it. Anybody can listen to it. So just be careful what you say on that channel. But you can do add custom channels, which are private. And only, if you remember at camp, I was telling everybody about the Prepper Camp channel, the Stessic channel that I had set up. And anybody that added that to their list of channels on their meshtastic node could talk to all the other people in the group that had added that channel.

And anybody that didn't have that channel didn't even know that the messages were being sent. But it could still skip through their mesh tag. Yes, yes. So I, really the only reason why people would set it to not repeat is if they're jerks or if we get so congested in area. I know parts of Europe is or having, because they were early adopters and they were having this problem where everybody had it set to repeat and it was getting too many messages. Just think about a room full of ping pong balls that were just bouncing all over the place. And they were getting collisions and the packets weren't going through. So, for the most part, just leave it. You're doing a good community service by having it set to repeat.

Okay. And I'm doing Sarah service by having mine set to repeat because you might get to your husband through me. Right. Just on mine being on. Yeah. If you're in the middle and I couldn't reach him on my own, but because of you, it'll skip to him. Okay. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. So the more people we get lit up between. It uses low power. I mean, there's tiny little, the little nodes can run, depending on which one you get and what size battery hit. But it can run a day or two up to, I've had them run a good week, maybe two weeks,

on these little, like what's pictured there. I've got a node like what's pictured, that tan one that's pictured. And it ran almost two weeks on one charge. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so next fall.

So, again, what we were talking about, nodes are these are the next few slides are just going to be examples of nodes um musi works is is a store on the internet um muse works dot com i think um and they sell that node um if you're at preper camp that's what you got for a speaker guest right right so and i don't actually so i'm not actually reading anything on it even though it does put up messages i would want to well you can you can read the incoming message on that little screen, but it's, it's horrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really hard. Yeah, so that's why you have your phone as a bigger screen to interact with it. Here's a cool one that I have. I have this one. It's about the size of a credit card. It only,

the charge lasts about a day. So like every night, I just charge it back in. But it's, it's waterproof and it works almost as good as the one that this one with the big antenna almost as good. So I like that because I put a little credit card sleeve on the back of my phone and I slide that note into it. So whenever I pick up my phone, it's all, it's like one unit. There you go. Yeah. So it works pretty slick. Yeah.

And then, I mean, here's another one. This was a cool one. This one has a battery backup. So it charges your phone if you want it to. And it's one of those, you know, some of the newer phones have the magnetic charge. Yeah. So that has that built in. So it's a phone charger and a meshastic node all in one.

And the same thing, it magnetic clips onto the back of your phone. That's cool. I'm not saying any of those are the ones you want to buy. I'm just saying, showing when I say mesh-tastic node, there's different form factors. and you're going to pick the one that works the best for how, you know, you carry it in a purse, you carried in your, you know, carpenter jeans, or you have it clipped onto the back of your phone, you know, whatever works. Yeah, that one we gave away was super like stripped down for them a one.

Yeah, yeah, that was the guts of it. That was like the erector set of mesh test. That's, yeah. I know Rose has the phone. But the cool thing about that is you could put that in a little waterproof case and use it as a repeater. They put it in your attic or put it outside on a telephone pole. whatever yeah that makes sense so um yeah so here we go so once you get a node that you carry with you so that nodes is basically your node you assign it to you and you're the only one that

log into it and send messages back and forth so sarah's got her node i've got my chin's node right so um those those are destination nodes right so a message will go to you or a message will come to me, right? So it's just like your cell phone. So I can call Sarah on the phone and nobody else gets a call, right? It comes to me as long as I dialed it correctly. But the other thing that you want to do is I would suggest on your property is have a node that you use as a true repeater, which you're not checking messages from. It's just up there sending and receiving traffic that's coming through, right? So the the best thing to do with this is if you have a solar panel on one of those nodes with some

extra battery in it and then you have an antenna that's mounted really high height is your friend um i know some people around um western north carolina mount the solar nodes up with radio towers and cell towers so we're getting like huge i'm getting i know i know know, on my note, I've seen traffic from almost 200 miles away. Crazy. Yeah, and that's on three hops. We'll get to what hops are. But that's on three hops, which is, you know, it's just going through three different.

Yeah. Yeah. If you're in a flatter area and you put it up higher, it's going to work better. Well, here, like, there's one on Mount Mitchell, which is six, six thousand, six hundred feet high elevation. and then there's on a radio tower on top of that mountain is a node and that thing's getting stupid you know distances now of course if if you're on the back side of a smaller mountain um you might not get the traffic like I'm lucky enough that my house is on the top of a hill mountain right right and so I get a lot of traffic because I'm but if I if somebody's down in a

valley they might not get it unless it's line of sight so unless your location you could see another node whether it be a one just on the top of a hill where you're at or a water tower or a skyscraper or whatever right it's like your satellite dish or something yeah yeah yeah okay so so those height is your friend and to get extra juice on these these repeater notes a solar panel and some extra batteries. So this is one that I actually have. It was donated to me right after Helene, and we use it to help improve signal here in my county.

So that's actually my little work page. Nice. And I was color coordinating my tools and put the rack. Oh, of course you were. Yeah. Rack wireless is a manufacturer is a brand name like Chevy or Ford RACA is a brand name. So that's the front cellular panel. And then when you flip it over, you see that big white thing in the middle is the battery pack.

And the little blue and white thing with the antenna is the node. Now that one, I actually, I got two of these. I brought one to Prepper Camp and I didn't show. Oh, yeah, I remember, but you put it up. Yeah, so that, I have one just like this at Preper Camp and I put it up. And when I brought it back, I didn't turn it off. I left it in the box. Uh-huh.

It's still up. When I checked last week, it was like at 83% battered. Crazy. Right? Nice. Like a month later. Because they just sit. I mean, that's a big battery.

And they just sip the power. It's cool how like do it yourself these are. It's like very much like radio. This one was this is probably almost $300 because you bought it. You know, it's all the fancy little waterproof connectors. Yeah. Yeah. That is an expensive little unit.

But here's some examples of. The one that is bottom center picture that has the black box with a little piece of solar panel on it and an antenna. That's just one that you can buy electric box from like Lowe's, the waterproof exterior box. And, you know, what Amazon or wherever, eBay or something, get a little solar panel and make this. and that one is actually, oops, I forget my computer has a touchscreen now. That one's actually you see the arrow pointing up into the tree. You can barely see the little antenna sticking down. That's that unit up in a tree.

Got you. So you can get created. And you could use this if you were search and rescue. You could take one of these and throw it up on top of a hill up in a tree. So the group that you were going with had good communication. Yeah. If you were going camping or like boating or hiking out or like or hunting out in the wilderness, right? Yeah.

You could take one of these with you and give communications for your group if you don't have cell phone signals. That's very cool. Yep. So you want to get creative. You can fly a kite. You know, you can put one on a drone. I know like the bottom left, there's one stuck in an airplane. I know I there's planes flying over all the time where you get a look on the the channel 19 channel like the community channel right people are like we're flying in from Atlanta and does anybody and they're just doing kind of like yeah just check in to see like who's got me just kind of seeing how far they can get and I know I've gotten Mar-a-Lago down to Florida crazy there was a plane flying over Mar-a-Lago or near Mar-Lar-Las and they they they're

position was was right there and so that had to be a plane probably hitting um a couple mountain tops getting out out to me and then bouncing it again yeah bouncing it which that's pretty amazing that is amazing that's why i say like the more we put in between north carolina and texas the better off will yeah um okay now a little bit about um setting these up When you get your node, your little mesh-tastic radio node, the very, very, very, very first thing you're going to want to do is put the antenna on. If it comes, if it's required to have an antenna, do not put power to the unit until you attach the antenna. Oh, interesting. The little circuit boards, just like the old-fashioned radios, are not very robust.

so if you turn that on and for whatever reason your node wants to broadcast a signal like sending out of whatever it'll fry your board it asks me how I know okay I'll tell you how I know because I had a node like we saw in those pictures with an antenna that comes off well I had a node in my car heart cargo pants right in the pocket. Unrenounced to me, the motion I was just walking had unscrewed that antenna. So I went to take it out when I got back into the house, and the antenna of the thing was like, oh, crap. So I tried, it wasn't working anymore. Oh, no. So that was my little science project to see what I tore the whole thing apart. Just looked at all the components and tore it all apart. but um so and then i called the manufacturer i said you might want to think of put like uh that

locktight yeah locktight and put like a warning to people yeah do not operate so you always if you have a removable antenna on your node just check it every time like every time you put it in your pocket or your purse or whatever your backpack just just make sure that the antenna's give it a little spin yeah and you might want to put a little bit of lock tight on just a little drop fair yeah um but Yes, that's very important. So after you put the antenna on, you can connect it. Because if you connect it to your computer, it's going to get power off the computer.

Oh, yeah. They typically come with a cord that you'll be able to connect it to USB on your computer. Okay. So when you connect it to the computer, you're connected to the wall to charge it, whatever, you're going to get power. That's why you have to have the antenna on. So what you're going to want to do is make sure that the firmware is up to date, just like on your computers and your phones and you're going to want to make sure the firmware's up to date. So if you get it from like Amazon or eBay, definitely make sure the firmware is up to date. If you get it from like MusieWorks or AltaVox, one of these like more, not high end, but these guys that really do a,

good job of putting them together and you know it's like the difference we the experience of going to mercedes dealer to pick up a car or going to the the Chevy dealer or the Hyundai dealer to you know when they do the hand over the keys and so right there's a way different experience right dollar store versus yeah so typically like i know uh altavox he um he actually um if you want he'll put in a private channel for you and bump down the public channel. He'll do some customization for you if you tell them what you want before it actually leaves the shop. So if you get it from him, you don't have to go through this step. But if you're getting it from any mail order place that's not like a small industry, cottage industry shop,

you're going to want to go to this website, which is, flasher.mastatic.org. Now, the last slide has a whole bunch of websites, and this is in there. So it's flasher.combextac.org. And it's through the meshtastic.org is the group that started, that found it. This is the foundation that started this whole meshtastic thing. So what you'll do is you go there on that left-hand side, you'll pick your device. when you hit that little green button, it has a pop-down screen.

I showed an example at the bottom left where it's a pop-down. You'll just scroll down there. Like the one that you have, Sarah, is the Heltech V3. So you would click on Heltech VC. Oh, okay. Okay. And then you go over to the next one. You select your firmware version.

So don't do the alpha because that's the bleeding cutting edge, which still could have some bugs that need be worked out. go to the newest beta version. So that's kind of like the newest tested, proven release, not the experimental release that's still working out some kinks. So you'll go, you'll select that one. And then you hit flash, boom. When you hit that flash button on the right,

it'll start sending the updated firmware to your node. Got you. You know, as long as your node is plugged in with it. the cable to your computer so it starts sending it over so good now you're you're updated your node while that's it might take a little bit but while that's going through the it's paces to get it updated make sure you go to your your phone or your tablet whatever you're going to use go to whatever app store that you use you know your apple or your play your um your app store or your google play store or like me since I'm

deg Googled I have to go to like side load it I go to a different store so download the app onto your phone got it okay so now you have your firmware's updated the app's updated on your phone

let's see here the F droid is what I use because it's if you have a degougled phone use F droid if you have a run in the middle like you have the Samsung phone that you got from 18 to your Verizon. Just go to Google Play.

Okay. Or if you have an iPhone, go to the App Store. So you're going to want to download the app. Okay, once you download the app, and you open the app on your phone, you'll see, I mean, it'll look something like this. On the left-hand side is Android, on the right-hand side is the iPhone screen.

Okay. They're very similar, And actually this latest update that I got on the Android version brought it even closer to looking like what the Apple version looks like. So this these slides going forward are almost identical, but not 100% of what the latest version is. I mean, it changed since camp. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they're constantly updating it. Yeah. But it's still, it's all the same.

It's like getting in a car. you know how to drive the car it's the same um but the icon pictures might have changed a little bit or they might have added a little something here there but it's the same so when you download you'll download it and you see across the bottom there's like the little uh quote box and then there's a two people and then the little like a folded up map oh yeah and then the signals and then the little cloud with a check box right so those are those are the menus So you click on the, if you click on the, like the text box, that's where you're going to see all the messages that come in. That's like your inbox on your email, right?

And then if you click on the two people, that's where you're going to see all the nodes that are near you. And then the next one over is the map. and that's where you can see all the maps and I have I'll show you these as we go into it the next foot over is let's see that one is

like you'll see channels where you can add and let's see that's like where you can add your nodes and stuff in okay so let's just keep okay so if you if you click on the the basically the settings the um that cloud button it gives you all these different um options menus right okay so the very first thing after

you you connect your um Well, we'll get to that. This just shows all the options, okay? So what, if you notice there's three screens there, right? I had to scroll down on my phone because they don't all, you don't see them all at one time. Okay. So I wanted to give you the knowledge of knowing that just that one screen is not all there are. It always, whenever you're in meshastic, always try to swipe up so you can, you know, scroll through to make sure there's nothing else at the bottom.

Because like I said, there's three, there's, I keep touching my screen. There's three screens here full of all different things that you can set on your node. Okay. And then when you get all the way down to the bottom, see, there's one where you can reboot and shut down those big green buttons. Yeah. So. Okay. So to connect your node, you're going to want to go to the window, the, the, the, the, the,

cloud and it gets you um yeah and i got that part done with uh looking it to the bluetooth then it gives the digit that's the um the pen right yeah and then you'll see the list of right Bluetooth you see just like peering like headsets and in your car and stuff um on your phone you'll see the list of meshtastic notes in your area and on your note it should say what it is like you know like the bestastic 700F, right? So you'll see that. And if you click on that, that's the one that you're. Okay.

And then you can change that name later, right? Yes, yeah. I didn't do that. But initially you have to pair your phone to your node. Right. And you're going to take whatever the factory called that node. Okay. That's what you're looking.

You see, like, if you don't see it in a list, hit the scan button at the bottom, it'll do a, you know, it'll scan and look for nodes near your phone within Bluetooth range of your phone. And what I always suggest is only turn one node on at a time, right? So if you have four of them for your family, only turn one out at a time. Yeah, so you can find it. Don't turn them all on. Yeah, it'll make it easy to find, right. Which one is it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So you get it connected. And, right, so sometimes that. If you have a node that has a screen, it'll pop up with a pin number, and you'll type that number into your phone's little pop-up screen, which is just like pairing anything else. If you don't have a screen, like the one that I carry, the little credit card one, the documentation that I got in the mail with that told me what the pin number was. So either it'll show up on the screen or you'll get documentation with your node. to say what the default pin is. And you could always change that,

but to do the initial pairing, that's what's going to be. Okay. Okay, so the first thing you're going to do now is, whether you're at the radio configuration menu, you're going to want to go to Laura, the Laura menu. And so if you click on that, on the right hand side, you'll see the menu. Set the region halfway down that menu.

the UC region. If you click that little down arrow, it'll do a dropout menu. Go to United States. Click on the United States. If you're in Europe, then click wherever you are. Just click the one to where you're at. It's not by state. It's by country. Okay. So click your country. What that doing is it's, Meshtastic has a small collection of radio frequencies they're allowed to use. And that's and they're doled out by country so that's telling your radio what frequency to use what radio frequency uh like what radio frequency you turn your walkie talking to right that's basically what that's doing but if you don't set your frequency you're not going to be able to talk to anybody else because it um it's not you know it's like when you turn your car stereo on and it's

on a m 88.6 or whatever that first channel is and you just hear static because you have to actually tune to a station that's broadcasting in range. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So the very first thing you need to do is connect the antenna, and then after you get the node fired up and uploaded and connected to your phone, the very next thing you're going to do is choose your frequency.

Well, choose your regions, which will set your frequency. Okay. Okay. Okay. So now the next thing, like you were saying, you can change the name. It doesn't have to be mesh-tastic 700F, which was one of the stock names that came on mine. You can go back into a user. See, on the left picture, the top one is this. So if you click on that, okay. Hold on it. Can you play a commercial or something for a second? Can you hold on one second? Yeah. I've got to take a call. One second.

Okay. No. That's the way it goes. Okay. Did you hear it? My whole demeanor changed for a second? I did. And I'm like, that's got to be something very important.

But sometimes you just got to do what you've got to do. So I'm back now. So let's go back to change in names. So if you go back to user, you click on that, you're getting a mini that looks like this. Up at the top left, you see it says your name. So there's a long name and a short name. Okay. So it's basically like giving your device a nickname.

Yeah. So you see it says user. when you click on user on the bottom middle, it says user configuration, and then there's a long name and a short name. I always set the long name first because the short name auto-populates off the long name. Okay. Which isn't a big deal because you can change the short name if you want. But stupid me, I learned the hard way.

I set the short name first, chin. You only get to use four letters for the short name. So I type in chin. And then I go up and I pick a long name for my node. Well, it keeps changing the bottom. Because it auto popped. You have to set your long name first. And then you can go back and reset the short name to whatever you want.

Okay. I think the top one takes like, I don't know, 12 or 18 characters, something like that, whatever. It's a longer name you can type in, which is good. So like, like if you have like Sarah Carr, Sarah Repeater. solar repeater, Sarah, or one for Sarah, right? So you can, if you have multiple nodes, you can call them all out. Yeah. But just know that the short name is only four, only allowed four characters.

Okay. So you could do like SH-1 or SH1, SH2, you know, whatever you want. Okay. So that's it. Then another very important thing that I learned the hard way is wherever you see, if you see remember to to hit the send button wherever you see a send button

don't forget always hit that because that's like hitting the enter button on your computer if you type that all in and then just click back you know if you hit like the back escape or whatever on your keyboard or the back button or something

it's not going to set that on your node and you have to do it all over there you were just typing stuff on your computer it's not going on your phone it's not being sent to the node until you hit the send button when you hit send it takes that information that updated information and Bluetooth sends it out to your node your node will accept it and it'll reboot okay and then it comes back online so when you hit send you're going to notice oh it disconnected well it rebooted and it automatically will come back online to just give it a second

Okay, yeah, here we go with the long names and short names, but... Okay. Yeah, you see like mine, this is literally my phone screen. See, it says MeshTasix 700F, and then I changed it to Chin card. And I usually, and the long name, I usually keep the factory name in there. Yeah, so you don't forget it? Yeah. And then I gave a short name just for, you know, has,

as meaning to me what the short name is. Right. But, easier to find on your life. I have so many. I can't just call each note chin because I have so many notes. Okay. So that's just,

and actually this is like two versions ago of the software on my phone. This was the one before camp and now there's one newer than this on my phone from after camp. So. Okay. So channel name. If you want to add a channel, go back to the radio configuration menu, click on channels. That'll open up the following screen in the middle. And if you hit the little plus button at the bottom, it'll bring up a pop-up bar, a pop-up menu,

which is what you see on the right. and that's where you can type in like you whatever Hathaway or knees not nuts right so you can have your own computer and that your own channel excuse me can have your own channel so you type in a name that you want to call your channel um you know family channel neighborhood watch channel whatever and then you see right right underneath it there's a little code yeah so that's a That's your security key. That's your security code. So the default, open to the public, is AQ, equal sign, equal sign. So that's the standard key that everybody, it's like the master key that everybody has in the world, right? Yep. And then they can put that into their system.

Correct. But what you want to do is you want to see that little circular arrow button on the right-hand side of that window, that bar, click on that. If you're making your own private, so you have, let's say, Neighborhood Watch, you have Neighborhood Watch, you type Neighborhood Watch for the name of the channel, and then you click on the Circle button. Click on the Circle. It'll automatically make a brand new key.

Now, that key is a private key. That key is only known to the people you share it with. Okay, so then they can't just get into you. They've got to have that special key to be able to get on. Right, exactly. So when you make your own custom channels, you're going to want to give it a name and then hit the refresh button and get a brand. I mean, you could type in your own key if you wanted to, but. Okay.

No sense. And then you see, there's a save button, so always make sure to hit that save button. Okay. Or save or send. Yeah, you're going to always want to hit that. Okay. Yep. Okay.

and you see what happened it gave on that oh it even makes a little QR code a huge long well no

on the left hand side you see now instead of just saying a Q equal sign equal sign it has this huge long key yeah

and then you see the zero is channel 19 we'll say the open public long fast channel and then

the new private channel is the one we just made which is a private channel okay yeah um now the one thing that you want to do is always make sure that you put a private channel in that zero spot in that very top spot um because that's that's what tells your node how to share um like personal data like location stuff like that okay so if you have it if you have

that public default channel as your primary channel, the zero channel. It's going to show everyone where you are. Yeah. If you have locations turned on, it'll share it out to everybody that can get that channel. If you have

one of your custom private channels in that zero location, the very top slot, then you can only people that you share the channel with will get it. And as long as the public long fast channel is down from the very top slot, you can shut off the sharing of the location and nobody in that in the open public,

general public is going to see like if you decide to share locations and stuff. Yeah, with your family group, that's one thing. You want to know maybe where each other are, you know? Yeah. Because I hate to do like a tracker on Christian's cell phone, But there's times when it'd be like, man, it'd be real nice to know, like, what, you know. Yeah. Or the other, so here's, like, if you do it with like a hunt club and you all go, like,

if you have leased land and they have locations where everybody goes to stands, everybody goes to. Yep. And you're going to want to know who's where so you don't get like friendly fire, you know. Right. Or even hiking. A proper lease would be set up so nobody would be able to shoot at each other. But even so, you'll know where people.

people are. And you can set how often that sends the signal out, the location out. So, I mean, you can set it to every 30 minutes or you can set it to every minute, whatever, you know. Right. You can get almost a live tracking of, which is really for safety. You know, if you guys are hiking or, you know, out, you know, in Disney World or whatever, you could do this. Yeah. Even at like some of the high school football games and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, at, Then if you want to share your channels, if you see on the right-hand side, there's a little green checkboxes. Oops.

Oh, I touch my screen. Oh, you touch the game. Yeah. You see the right-hand side? There's a little green check boxes. Anyone that has a green check in it is going to be shared with that QR code. So, like, what I did. for PreperCamp is I

deselected all my private channels and only left PreperCamp channel with a little green checkbox. Yep, and then that QR code was only sharing that PreparCamp channel. Love that. Okay. Makes sense. So I did. So I could have like a changing Earth channel

and only my changing Earth fans can know. Yeah. And so the recipient, and you can screen print, what I just screen printed in my phone, and then I copied it and, you know, put it in a little word document and printed it out. Yeah. So it's not, you know, it's not size. You can change the size or whatever.

So what I would do is screen print if you had like a neighborhood watch one and if you were going around to your neighbors and say, hey, here's the message you guys here, you know, I would do a screen print of the neighborhood watch, only neighborhood watch. and just save that in your photo albums and then pull that up and say here just scan this boink and that'll add it to their meshtastic that makes sense yeah another key thing is when you're when the recipient is adding channels new channels to their list so if if sarah you have the changing earth channel and then I come over and I scan your phone on my phone, it's going to say, do I want to add or do I want to replace? If you hit replace,

it's only, it's going to clear out all the channels I had originally. Oh, no. It only put the channels that are associated with that QR code. Oh, my gosh. So always make sure you hit add. But the work around that is get used to doing a QR code, doing a screen. screenshot of all your standard channels. So like your everyday carry channels, do a screenshot and save that. Okay. So if you ever mistakenly wipe out all your channels, you just have to go back and take a scan of that QR code and it'll repopulate it. Is this speaking from experience?

Yeah. See, this class is all about like, two years of mistakes that I've made that you guys don't have to make. Love it. So that's the cool thing you could do. You can also, at the bottom, there's the little URL, the, the, the, the link, yeah, address. So if you hit the little copy symbol, it'll copy that whole URL code, and you could email that to people, whatever. That's cool.

And if they click on that and they have MeshTasic installed, app installed on their phone, it'll automatically open their app and it'll ask, you know, if they want to add or replace whatever. Gotcha. So there's two ways to share, either the website address or the QR code. Okay, the thing about people always ask, well, how far can they go? Well, yeah, kind of. It depends. I know with mine, it's similar to my GMRS walkie-talkie.

So I can get between a half a mile to about five miles with my walkie-talkie. And so my node unassisted point-to-point without doing repeater hops, depending on terrain and like trees and buildings and stuff, I can get between like a half mile to the valve. five miles. Now, if I'm top of a mountain, I can get a lot of miles right to the next mountain range. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's why I'm kind of curious if I go further here. But this isn't actually a screenshot. Yeah. And so like there's, there's 172 miles on seven hops. Yeah. 172 miles. And that that on the, you know, left hand side, that's actually when you hit the little map icon, that's a picture of nodes that were popped up that I could see for my house. And that's working without the internet, right?

Like, if the internet shut down, you can still see them. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, she's using the radio service. Yeah, that's pretty neat. Now, it, yeah, it all depends, it's a line of sight. So if you have good, like if you're standing on the beach and there's a boat out in the ocean, you're going to get good line of sight, right? If you're staying at the beach and you're trying to get inland,

there might be, you know, there might be a town or city between you and, like, a campground. Let's just, we used to go camping. So the campground might be inland because it's cheaper than staying at the beach, right? But you drive 45 minutes to get to the beach, right? Well, you might not get back to the camper. Right, because there's just so much harder in between you and the camper. That might so. Okay, so the map is pretty cool, too.

If you click on, just like Google Maps, you could choose. Oh, yeah, it had some great maps on there. Yeah, you could choose, like, the standard, like, street map. You could do a top-o map. Right. You could do a satellite map. So this is the exact same location. One is, like, the street map, and one's the top-o map.

And that's, I was not at my house when I did this, but this was screen prints off my phone. Like, I use the top-o maps for research and for my books and stuff like that. There's several different top-o maps, see? Yeah. Yeah, I did like that feature. Okay. There's more, I mean, that's just, this is just another bigger picture of the nodes that you can see all over the place. Now, I mean, I am probably a little north.

I'm in North Carolina, north of the Greenville, right? Yeah. So it's kind of where Prepper Camp was. So you could see all the ones. that we're getting because a lot of it's probably because of the one on Mount Mitchell which is see the MM 8H

okay those are the actual repeater. That MM is Mount Mitchell. The 8H when this screenshot was taken it was eight hours ago that my note had seen that like the RAC 1st, the RAC 1H so one hour ago or the FB2H

2H two hours ago. Got you. That's just the time it's their little shorthand how would somebody else's the name of the it's a short short name for the node and then the time lapse between when your node saw it or not got you and then like you see the circles with the numbers in them so like the six there's six nodes inside so if you scroll if you zoom in you'll start seeing all the individual ones okay and so those could be nodes or somebody like those could be repeaters or somebody's an actual node.

Like that MM, I know, is the Mount Mitchell repeater. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so then if it was pinging you, like if somebody was out hiking or whatever, you could see, like, I saw, you know, Christian's node here an hour ago. So that's where we're going to start. Yeah, you know like an hour. Right.

So like for search or rescue, you could say, well, we know 30 minutes ago this person was at this location. If you go to that location and they're not there, well, at least it shortens the, Yeah, absolutely. You know, the window of where you're looking. Yeah. Oh, also like grid down situation too. You can see like your team. If everybody was on that, you could see like if you're clearing.

If this was zoomed in. So like I said, like a hunting lease, which is so you know where all these people are. Yeah. So if I'm, let's just say, if I'm in the sixth location, I probably don't want to shoot directly like, you know. Mm-hmm. Yeah. east-southeast to me because I might hit number two yeah yeah so you don't want to hit number two no yeah it's a mess especially if it hits a fan you're right um okay so okay so the next thing you

don't want to do until you get a comfort level on what you're doing i would always go into position and hit disable okay out of the box it comes position enabled So the very first thing you want to do is just disable your location sharing. Okay. And then start getting used to using it. And then you can start turning them on by channel. Each channel can turn on or off location sharing. Okay.

So just go to say disable and then go in after you start making some custom channels and start enabling them. Okay. Because if you don't, if you forget, you're broadcasting. Yeah, mine is broadcasting right now. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's not on. And it's not the right firmware, but yeah.

Yeah. I never knew that. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So when we were talking about hops. Yes. A hop is the number of radios that are allowed to repeat your message until you

want it to end. Okay. And that's all done to help congestion, traffic congestion, right? If you just say infinity hops for everything, it just will, like, kill the network because it's just, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping,

the room full of ping pong balls. So if you set it out of the box, it's set to three hops. And what three hops means it takes you, you're the one on the left here, and it goes one hop, two hop, three hop. And that very last one will send it one more time. So zero hop.

So hopefully the zero hop person is the desired recipient of the message. Okay. Yeah. So really, if you said it to three, it's going out for radiuses past year, right? For us. Okay. so that's just what hop means so they say to do it three i know and if your areas doesn't have a lot of when you turn it on you don't see a lot of notes and you just there's not

a lot of people using it yet i have mine i had mine at seven now that i'm seeing more users i backed it down to five okay you know if it gets really like if you're in a large town or city and you know there's a lot of people using it yeah maybe we put it down to three. You know what I mean? What happens they just not get the message? And how do you know if they didn't get the message? You'll know.

So I think, let's see if I probably have a screen for that. I'll show you. Okay. So when we're talking about hops, you can set your max hop. Okay. And to do that, you go into the Laura menu again. And if you see, it says hop limit. You see, this is where you set your regions, the U.S.

it also says hop limits so sit it to you know sit at the 7 or 5 or 3 whatever okay it's kind of like the not really but if you think of like on your radios you have the squelch button yeah and like

if you're getting a lot of just crap and low signals you turn a squelch up a little bit to drown those out to keep so it's not like you know making all the noise and stuff on your radio and then if you really get if you're out in the middle of nowhere's you turn the skulls all the way down to zero because you want to get as many signals as you can okay you know it's kind of like that and what do I say hit the send button always remember whenever you make a

change if there's a send or a save little button at the bottom hit it hit it hit it okay now that That's, let's see. Wonder where, one second. So these are some cool tricks that I've kind of learned over the couple of years of doing it. Like I said, always scroll down to see if there's more than what you're seeing in front of you on the screen, right? Because there's usually a lot more to the menu than just what you can see on the screen at that one time. So scroll all the way down, you see those green buttons at the bottom. bottom, reboot. If you just want to, you know, sometimes it's good to reboot your phone or

reboot your computer. Sometimes if it hasn't, like once you get these nodes set up, there's really not a reason to reboot them. I mean, you probably will not be rebooting them that often just naturally, organically. But every once in a while, it just kind of clears them out and makes them run smoother, just like your phone and your computer. If you just shut it off once in a while or reboot it once in a while. So hit that reboot and it every once in a while. The other thing, see the shutdown button. A lot of these nodes don't have like an on-off switch.

They have like two or three buttons. Like your node has a couple different sized buttons on them. And one button, if you short press it, it does one thing. If you push and hold it, it does another thing. And I can't remember which does what. I don't know what they do. I just press it a lot. But if you're looking at this, if you want to change the antenna, like you've got a new

antenna, you want to put a new antenna on it, and you don't want to fry your node, go to the bed you had your phone, scroll down, and hit the shutdown. And then watch your node. It makes sure all the lights will flash a couple times and then go off. Okay. You screen off everything. So that's the nice thing. about that shutdown button is you know that you shut it down.

Some of these nodes that I really like have an actual on-off like slider. Yeah, that it's a click back and forth. Yeah, and I just like that. That's really how it should be. But I guess it's saving money, yeah. And then like if you were going to give a node away that you've used, you're going to want to hit the factory reset. Oh, yeah, fair.

Or like if you're going to sell it, like resell it or give it to somebody that, you know, give it to a neighbor or something, but you've already used. Like you've got a new one and the old one you're not going to use, but you're just going to re-gift or something. Do a factory reset and then set it up fresh for them just so they don't get any of your channels and any of your old messages and stuff like that. and then the last thing down there the node db reset that's that's all the um where's the map there here um so all these nodes the node database node db database reset what it'll do is they'll just delete all those nodes that it that it has in its little memory bank and a good use that node DB database reset is like if you go on a road like when you came out to prepper camp you're collecting nodes the whole way up and the whole way down yeah yep but they're not

nodes that are going to be useful to you unless you're in the area where they were right right yeah so why have them all saved when you get home doing uh node database reset boom it just now it'll just freshly start repopulating the nodes that it sees in your area. you. So when you look at the map, you know that those are ones that you're seeing while you're home. I do this, like when I go to see family in Charleston, when I get back home, I hit the node database reset because I don't want to think that I'm seeing what Charleston's seeing. You know what I mean? Absolutely. That makes sense. Yeah, so that's the reason to, that's the reason to use that. Yep.

Yeah. Okay. So this is another thing that I've learned. This was a fresh slide for this year that wasn't on the last year's, is really the most important thing about mesh-tastic nodes are the people. Getting other people involved and getting other people to get a node and keep it charged and have it active in your area. creates the mesh node and it makes it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

That's what I'm having a challenge with now because my goal is to get my whole county connected so everybody could text back and forth so I could be in town. Like I could talk on my walkie-talkie with my wife because there's a repeater between us and I use that repeater. But I'm still having problems with mesh-tastic getting that same distance because there's not enough nodes between me and her to actually make it work. And there's enough mountains that shadow between me and some of the repeaters when I'm on the road.

You know what I mean? Yep. So I can't guarantee that I'm going to get a message from town home. You would ask about... Yeah. How do you know if it got there? How do you know? Let's see if I can find a screen.

no so when you're looking a message when you're looking at the screen I don't have a screenshot so when you're looking at the message screen remember I said

that that little the text box message the on the left-hand picture, the bottom button on the left, the little text box. When you're clicked on that and it shows all the messages, on the right-hand side of each message, it'll have like a little, has a couple different character, a little icons that could be there. If it has a cloud with a checkbox in it, it means it went out to at least hit another note.

okay um so like if you're sending a group message you know that it went out to at least one node in that group saw it and acknowledged the message if you get the cloud with a line through it it means it went out but it never saw another node okay and if you're sending a direct message like me to you and it has a little person with a checkbox in it that means it actually got to you okay It got to the intent. So depending on, like, if you're doing direct messages, you're going to get, you'll see, it'll go out. If it sees another node, you'll get a cloud with a check, they wait a little longer, and then it'll either be a cloud or a line that it didn't get to the desired recipient, or you'll get, it'll change over to a person with a check. That means it got to the person that you're trying to send the direct message.

So it's kind of showing you the progress along the way. Yeah. Yeah, so there's three different icons, and it kind of gives you a status of the message. Okay. Yes. Well, I'm feeling way better. I think I can actually, like, attack this thing now. And then here, so this is important.

You've got, if you have one, you can use it around your property. You can use it when you go, like, at the campground, whatever, or most of those. If you're in a, like, I know, like, Lowe's, I don't know what, Lowe's, I swear, screws with cell signals, so you can't price shop, right? Because you'll pull it up and try to go to Amazon and check a price to see how Lose is compared to, or Home Depot, you're trying to get on the Internet, and you can't, you know, have a signal. It happens all the time, at least on ours. But, but, Ron and I, if we're like, if she's in gardening and I'm in lumber or whatever,

we can still mesh-tastic send messages back and forth even with honestly so that's really useful we use that all the time but people are you got to get a group of people involved get it start with your family and then your neighbors and then you know whatever your local cert team or work out from there yeah you have a cert team something like that yeah go to the schools like middle school, high school, go to community colleges or regular colleges, go to clubs, like ham clubs, drop in on like the police and the sheriff or the sheriff, you know, see if they're interested in trying to get, just get out to, like, civil, I mean, like, if you have scouting groups or whatever kind of clubs.

Yep, makes sense. Church, churches. Yep, church, church, it would be perfect. for churches because they could each of the neighborhoods that has the church like I've been trying to get my mom's church to put one in their steeple because most everybody could get a message yep right no lies they have like the highest yeah yeah I like that okay so this screen on now Sarah the the file that you have the PowerPoint has this okay but people could see there's there's a whole list of of the all the the notes that I showed the little meshtastic radio notes that I showed in this there's um the website addresses to get to them there and then um like uh meshtastic.org its site and then the flasher to download the firmware that sites so you can those are some good um websites to go to rocklin.com.com is like the radio Shack.

Oh, there you go. Okay. Uh-huh. That's what I was saying. Like, where is the Radio Shack, man? Yeah, it's Rockland. Rockland, they're out of Florida. Okay.

They're awesome. They're the ones that hook me up on getting those solar repeaters. Yeah, they're great. Good people. That is cool. Those are nice, too. Yeah. Okay.

Rocklin. dot com i put that up for everybody no so mushy works alt the box and rockland those are the ones yeah okay

that's that's it thank you yeah um yeah that's enough to let you know which you kind of what questions you want to ask right yeah because

you'll probably not remember it you could take the slideshow and maybe walk yourself through but at least you'll know when you like i learned this all through YouTube videos, right? So at least you'll know what you're what you don't know and you'll know what you're trying to learn. Right. By watching that slideshow. Yeah. Very cool, man. I feel so much like I'm way more confident about it. Plus, I'm glad you heads up me on the location thing

because whenever mine's been on and it was actually like good. I'm sure I was just broadcasting my location. And you won't know that, right? You don't know that. Right? You don't know. Right. I've seen a bunch down in, of course, Dallas, but I was going, I was getting stuff all the way to Houston. That's why I was curious, like, what was going on with that. Probably, and you got the airport there, the international Dallas airport. So people flying up in a plane. Yep. And we even have a local one, too.

Yeah, people are bouncing through there. Local airport as well. Yep. All right, 10. Well, thank you so much for throwing up. out your notes and doing the full class because I feel much more confident in how to use my note. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to get the boys' notes. So there we can all synchronize. Tell them to watch the show. Right. Yeah. We got some good polls right by our house. And we're

actually one of the highest hills in the town that I live in. We're on like the highest hill. so do you know do businesses if you if your friends like any of your friends it'd be worth putting a note up and giving them a note you know what you mean like tell the business over here here's a note this is what you might want to look into you know I'll help you sit up more if you want to get more for your family or for your your staff yeah fair because I was I was I'm in some some clubs and stuff and and I'm like we were at the the building where the the club And I said, so what happens if the phones go down? Like, how are you going to, you know, what if the cell phones go down? How do you communicate with your people? How are you going to, yeah. So like I like left the walkie-talkie with them because I have a few.

And I say, here, take this, experiment with it. Take it home, see if it works from your house. And we'll get you set up. So, you know, you got to build those networks. And the tech is cool, but the people-to-people networks are what's really. most important what drives it and the tech seems easy enough and it's multi-platform yes it doesn't matter what kind of phone that they like yeah because the radios I'm like oh no I'm gonna have to take so much time learning so much stuff and I just don't have yeah I'm telling you the walkie-talkies

yeah I really the walkie talkies well my area I'm blessed with some really good repeaters like clubs and stuff I put up so my walkie-talkie works much better than my mesh-tastic only because I don't have enough mesh-tastic notes up yet. I'm sure it would in Texas as well. I'm sure there's tons of. Rowe talks about it. And that's, I mean, that's why I hooked you guys up

because I was like, okay, you live much closer to me and know about it. But I would have all three. I have your cell phone, mesh-tastic, and GMRS. Those three should cover most anything. It makes sense. Yeah, at least for a local. you know, regional and stuff, you're going to have to have ham, but for local stuff. Yeah.

Very good. All right. Well, let's get out of here. Thanks, everybody, for joining us tonight. Happy to see you and happy to have you in the chat and everything. If anybody has any more questions at all for Chin regarding mesh, we'll hang out for one more second. But if everybody is kind of feeling good like I am about it, that was a great presentation. I do I feel much more

You gotta go play with it I mean you just gotta play with it Yeah All righty well looks like we're good So until next time remember Dream Survive Thrive

Thrive Oh Okay We lied What's the startup price on it Like a unit like mine So like yours is probably I don't know 45 bucks or so

Okay And then you were saying that One repeater that's like super nice is like 300 bucks okay so i lied but it yours is like uh 65 to 75 dollars okay mine the little credit card one is 40 bucks okay um but you know what's coming up real soon is black friday fair and that's a great time to pick up tech whether it be radios or meshtastic or get on go to all the sites that I show in my little list of websites and get on their mailing lists. And they'll send you when they're, yeah, they'll send you like the MusiWorks and the AltaVox and the Rockland.

They'll send you, uh, sales announcements. Yep. Yeah. I've, I've been told the same thing for like Duluth trading company and all those because they have great. Oh, those crack dealers, Duluth, man. Oh, man. We have so much. This stuff is great.

It's like Carhart. For the summertime. Yeah. But they're crack dealers. They're always sending us sales. Yep. Yep. You got to get it.

All right. It's just got to be done. All right. All right. We're out of here. Until next time, remember. Dream. Survive.

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