Hadn’t realized my connected phone had crashed. Rebooted and got a ping and three test messages from @nickandre15. Out of curiosity? Do you recall where these were sent from? Just sent a reply, but went unconfirmed.
I’ve moved the device from pointing directly North to pointing North/Northwest.
I was rather close to Cinerama at the time (just driving by).
My current nodes, should all be pingable:
SLU - GID 9140 7595 4367 50
Cap Hill - GID 9009 0842 0250 22
Fremont - GID 9930 0945 4853 88
I’ve had trouble getting reliable connectivity from SLU to Cap Hill unfortunately – sometimes it works fine, other times it doesn’t. A few times it was able to use a mesh hop to get through. I think I may try to procure a Gotenna with an external SMA antenna.
G’day goTenna Seattle Net. My name is Tim. A ham operator (W3WNE), mechanical designer, CERT and a caterer on my spare time. Just ordered 4 goTennas. One form my wife, myself and a spare (for now). The 4th, like to place semi remotely in my acre on a hill as a MOAN node. Love to learn more about constructing one. In the mean time, greetings!
Welcome! Seems like Seattle is starting to get a lot more activity and coverage now!
If you’re able to successfully build out a moan, I’d be interested in taking what you’d learned to help expand that coverage. Unfortunately, I’m pretty garbage at soldering.
Also, @nickandre15 I got your emergency message the other day at Cinerama station. About 1.2 miles.
Anyone have a vacation home in San Juan Islands where they can setup some Gotenna mesh relays? That area really needs it due to poor cellular coverage.
If anyone knows any ham radio operators out there maybe they could get involved.
Just set up another permanent powered relay near Cinerama. It’s in the same building as the one with a pingable GID listed on the node map, but faces out a different direction. Tested today and messages are getting to my node near the sculpture park with 100% reliability, but confirmations are at 0% reliability. The node there has an unobstructed view of Bainbridge Island and the East side of Alki.
Apparently, the Seattle Ambassador City is not yet “very” active. Is that right? I’m planning to use goTenna mesh for combined marine and land “tactical networks”, as training for Disaster Response Teams. I’ll be in and out of the Seattle area, but mostly active in eastern Washington. I’m mostly interested in ways to set up repeaters, as well as blending mesh location awareness of stations with amateur radio networks that can cross-communicate with marine radio. Mostly, my view is that GMRS ought to have DSC and AIS like marine radio. Since they don’t, we can possibly mimic this with goTenna mesh networks using NIMS and ICS trained station operators having the mesh as another feed or “sensor” for station location sharing. It might even work… maybe.
The “Mother of All Nodes”, as near as I can tell, is not functioning. I operate 4 repeater locations (2 of them with multiple repeaters with clear visibility out different sides of the buildings) - with battery back-ups. Two of these have public GIDs for range testing. I know @nickandre15 has also set up a few repeaters and I’ve received test messages from him a few times. I would expect that most relays listed on the node map that are not mine or Nick’s likely are no longer valid.
Also, I found this video on YouTube about some prepper guy that tests GoTennas around Seattle. I have a relay right where he concludes his range test on 5th ave - and another a few block south on 5th. He could have probably continued down 5th quite a ways and still had messages delivered via my nodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKucfbvAcZQ
I can understand why many purchasers don’t keep their units up and operating all the time. In fact, I can imagine they forget they even have them. My thinking is that groups can use them during “events” now and then to enhance their team’s location awareness. But Life360 lets their cell phones do that already, for free. In any case, “somebody” has to develop on land 2-way systems to match the functionality of marine radio, so I’m going to try.
Life360 relies on internet/cellular connectivity to function and I question the security of user data if it’s “free”.
GoTennas work offline and don’t offload data to a server for core functionality. Combined with encryption and meshing, I believe these are still the best alternative to cellular.
As for @gua742 (creator of MOAN), I haven’t seen him on here in a long time. I hope nothing bad happened as he skydives a lot. GoTenna staff is likely to be quiet on here as they have their hands full with the Pro X.
I think I would be happy with most of the Gotenna Pro capabilities for civilian use.
Thanks. I agree that the need for mesh networks when cellular is unavailable or undependable or overwhelmed is why goTenna exists; but for training it costs nothing to use Life360 and get features that equal goTenna Pro. After finally testing Mesh nodes yesterday (they arrived in the mail), I see that Mesh only allows hiking or hunting parties to text each other and “sort of” see location data. Only the Pro version does what I was hoping for. I really don’t know what I’d use Mesh for in Seattle… I was hoping that Mesh could augment GMRS to allow boaters to coordinate with ground parties better by adding location sharing. I think that still might be viable, but a little clunky. I don’t know where the cellular coverage with data has gaps in Puget sound, so it might just be an emergency tool. Hiking in the San Juans may have gaps; I don’t know. Marine radio with DSC and AIS would always work except that it is illegal when communicating between land parties.
The civilian Mesh units can do automatic location updates. It does require the goTenna Plus subscription (free 30-day trial, $29/year after that, although there’s a current $10/year deal), but the functionality is there (called location tethering). If you can forgo automatic updates, manual location requests can be auto-accepted without the subscription. This requires you to request someone’s location, but once auto-accept has been enabled, it doesn’t require the person you are trying to locate to do anything to get a location update back. These requests will mesh, too, and work in groups of up to 10 people.
In the goTenna app, there is an FAQ that can explain more of the functionality. Also, there may be a 3rd party app built on top of goTenna Mesh to get closer to Pro functionality.
In full disclosure, I haven’t messed around that much with the location stuff. My interest is more communication than tracking.
I was incredibly excited about GoTenna until I realized that their SDK completely prohibits any form of interoperability which makes it just about useless. I was kind of shocked to hear that something as simple as creating a chat bot on the goTenna network had been totally precluded by the design of the SDK. Whereas I thought that I could write a node to forward messages via a satphone link from the GoTenna App using a radio and a USB cable, I now realize that’s totally impossible given the current draconian restrictions imposed in the name of “security” or some such PM hilarity.
I still operate one relay node in SLU on the map. To be honest though since I discovered the SDK had a critical handicap I’ve been more inclined to stock old fashioned FM HTs for GMRS or Ham use in emergencies than I have to play around with these especially given the lower range and lack of robust repeater deployment.
Although in preparing for the impending coronapocalypse I may transport my stock of Gotennas to our new residence to try them there.