Meshtrastic: Bypassing the Hype
Reference – 3G
By GuerrillaLogistician
@glogistician on X.com
Nothing screams Dunning and Kruger more than someone who tells you that you can’t track a signal because there are multiple signals all transmitting at once. That is how this whole damn article started: some know-it-all “I am a HAM” got me to go out and buy two nodes and dive into these things. I have been told to stay away from meshtastic by just about everyone from @4nt1p4tt3rn to @Brushbeater in person, online articles written by them, and others on how bad mesh networks are for the prepared citizen. Many of the Meshtastic community that promote this system for Preppers and grid down situations are the “Fire two blasts” Biden Fudd logic that makes it so hard to deal with. In the same breath, however, there are several people who use mesh networks for things that are not involved in preparedness. This can range from sensors to augmenting cool little weather stations that they have built themselves and installed on the tower or in a tree.
This article is not to denigrate the concept of using LoRa in totality or as an interesting experimental device to play with. The reason why I’m so disparaging about this communications product is the inherent issues with it, and the absolute BS artist trying to push it is some new end phenomenal technology, which it isn’t. Not only that, but others also believe the hype, as seen in the video Botkin put out on the subject, along with ATAK. I am not shitting on Botkin or T.Rex for producing comms videos. However, the people running around promoting mesh networks tend to have no earthly idea how these things work. Some guy came to them and said, “Hey, we can have a secure integrated network system that will give us location, communication, in a small package, and it is affordable to the common guy.” This seems like a perfect setup for all your needs, and much like the cool capabilities seen in Blue Force Tracker/video games, giving everyone a view of everything, sounds amazing.
The young audience of YouTube eats this stuff up because they think this is a normal way of life in combat. Who wouldn’t want a system that is built like this and can do such phenomenal things, and we all know that right behind logistics reconnaissance is one of the most important things for any group of people in conflict with another. If I know where all my adversaries are and what they’re doing, I will never be caught off guard if I’m even half intelligent. One of the reasons that the Germans lost so many submarines during World War 2 was because of how the British and Americans routinely detected the submarines and could send out forces to attack them. Even with the METOX radar interceptor that was short-lived, it helped the German submarines to dive, but it wasn’t long before new technology removed that capability.
Add to that most of the reasons the Germans were getting hammered was due to hubris and not truly following a good comms plan for the environment they were operating in. This is all while a lot of the decryption at Bletchley Park wasn’t decoding things in a fast enough manner to really affect the war. That said, the Germans thought that because they had good encryption, they could be sending transmissions back and forth to these loan fighting vessels, whose key principles were stealth and the capability of ambushes; they didn’t put a priority on keeping silent. I’m not saying it wasn’t part of their communications plan, but the reality is they talked a lot more than they really had to and allowed a lot of the British ships to DF and steer convoys away. Before I break this down, though, let’s go over a few good reasons to look at the mesh network.
There are good reasons to run mesh networks on Farms, tracking sensors in an area YOU control and can’t be compromised by others. It can also be a fun WHITE SIDE communications device for families, friends, etc. So let’s say you have a large piece of property that you control for the most part, and you want to communicate with people on it or just look at sensors for temperatures. Maybe you have a sensor to make sure the cattle’s drinking pools haven’t drained. For this reason, Meshtastic is a great, cheap way to do this with some small solar panels, a couple of batteries, and off you go. Add to that, you can use the same network to communicate with family members through text messages if you have no service from cell phones in certain areas on a large piece of property.
This also moves on to another thing that I do approve of. Meshtastic is fine for decentralizing communications off of companies like AT&T and Verizon, but it still has the drawbacks of being traced like a cellphone, so keep that in mind. And this is one of the reasons why repeaters and ham radio operators still exist and like to talk with one another. If you want to chit-chat with people or communicate with random strangers in your community, this isn’t a bad concept if a lot of people buy a couple of these fairly cheap computer forward transceivers and set them up. Add to that, many of the people picking up mesh networking with LoRa are also experimenting with antennas and learning things about radio communications they probably wouldn’t know in the first place. It is also very similar to how the Internet works, which gives new users a better understanding of why a MAC address exists. So, for your white side chatting communications and daily enjoyment, this isn’t a bad product. It’s when we get into the survival, prepper, and military side of things that people fail to understand the weaknesses.
What has really happened with most of the community, though, is the fact that many people are just tired of talking about this product in the sense of survival. I can’t blame these people and to be honest with you so many of them have talked about it that it’s gotten to the point that they can’t possibly fathom why anyone in their right mind would want to use these devices after being exposed to the information. What I do think gets missed by some is the fact that this information may be obvious once you pick up a device it isn’t always to a new person. Hell, I knew these things were not good, but I couldn’t articulate in detail how terrifyingly awful they are until I grabbed a handful of them to play with. For the prepper on a budget it is not something I would recommend even investing time in because you will never get the money back that you invested in these devices. I will dig into that a little bit later.
Weaknesses in NPE / Survival situations
While these little devices do connect into a network of communications abilities, there are several weaknesses out of the box for just simple natural disaster situations. Things like stubby antennas to keep the device small, and some of the boards don’t even hit a watt, which isn’t a big deal with the right antenna. Anyone who’s read the Guerrilla’s guide to the Baofeng radio realizes that getting a line-of-sight device with an antenna high enough gives you more range. This is one of the benefits of actually educating yourself on technology and communications that the mesh networks do provide, because you have to do a lot of things to get these things to connect, especially in areas where there are not a lot of nodes. Nodes are either active radios or radios set to operate as repeaters, although there are several settings; these are the two most common setups.
For common usage and setting up in a city that’s not a big deal, but what happens when that city has a breakdown in the structures that hold up some of the repeating nodes high off the ground? Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Major Storms can all knock these nodes down, just like repeaters can get trashed, and now you have a little device with a weak signal and marginal range, which isn’t even being listened to by Disaster relief workers. Add to that, almost all of these devices require a cell phone to connect to your mesh network. Now, you can be smart and get a tablet that allows you to connect via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, only bypassing cell service, but if you do that, both of these devices are going to be communicating regularly with one another.
Although one thing is viable with this device and that is the ability to transmit fairly long distances with little power. Meshtastic has a good ability to send Line Of Sight packets that can be received with another device and turned into text. This band is very capable of passing through many buildings, so in a flat area, such as a city, it has a better chance of cutting through your walls and barriers that humans make. What it is not good at is going through wooded areas like forests. This means these nodes are not as refined and capable of transmitting in the more rural areas that a lot of preppers like to live in, compared to the city. Which means if you want to get that transmission through, you’ll have to purchase more nodes. Unfortunately, with that fixed band, you can’t switch over between UHF and VHF depending on your environment, and this means that it will drastically reduce your signal strength. On average, most people will spend $25 to $30.00 for a standard node.
If you buy them directly from a distributor like Heltec, you can get the boards for as low as $16 to $20. With that said, I can set up a couple of Baofeng’s to my specific settings and even create a repeater with two of them for far less money and with far more capability and range. Plus, many Baofeng radios can listen for hours on end, whereas many of these little devices don’t last very long without buying a bigger battery or wiring them for solar. Pair these with a tablet with multiple applications on it for multiple reasons, from bullet drop to mapping, and I have created a far simpler system that is far more robust for the price of a mesh network.
Don’t get me wrong, the mesh software is not God awful, it is very intuitive compared to having to work different applications, and I think this is one of the reasons why NC Scout calls it the lazy way out. Although I can’t read his mind and have not asked him specifically, you can see where this looks easier and feels simpler than having to learn apps and do the technology drive to understand how to better perform with actual radios. If you add a little single-board computer to a simple Baofeng, you can get software called APRS to do the same thing as Mesh Tastic does, and if your radio system has GPS, it can send that information as well, just like Meshtastic. Everything the mesh networks do was originally done by APRS and I would say they did it better. You can buy used radios these days for around 100 dollars that will allow you to text and communicate your location with APRS. The only thing APRS doesn’t have is encryption do to it being a HAM operator device.
Let’s see what Meshtastic has to say about some of the data transmitted.
- Packet Header: is described directly by the PacketHeader class in the C++ source code. But indirectly, it matches the first portion of the MeshPacket protobuf definition. Note that the packet header is not encoded using a protobuf, but is sent as raw bytes. This both saves airtime and allows receiving radio hardware to optionally filter packets before waking the main CPU.
Explanation: What does this mean? First is the destination info, and then you send who is originating the message. Basically, “Hey You, this is Me” or “AV8, this is LOG1” in plain unencrypted text. There are a few more bits of info that are more unique, but basically, this is the info that says you are transmitting and who you are sending it to.
- Packet Header – NodeIDs: are constructed from the bottom four bytes of the MAC address of the Bluetooth address. Because the OUI is assigned by the IEEE, and we currently only support a few CPU manufacturers, the upper byte is de-facto guaranteed unique for each vendor. The bottom 3 bytes are guaranteed unique by that vendor.
- Packet Header – Unique ID: The ID is a large, 32 bit ID to ensure there is enough unique state to protect an encrypted payload from attack.
- Payload: An encrypted and packed protobuf encoding of the SubPacket protobuf. Only the SubPacket is encrypted, while headers are not. This allows the option of eventually allowing nodes to route packets without knowing anything about the encrypted payload. For more information, see the encryption and Protobuf API Reference. Any data past the maximum length is truncated.
So now we know that there is a lot of little data flying around via initial transmission and subsequent transmissions that is not only open source but is a fingerprint of both receiver and transmitter. Most of this is just an ID number setup starting with a 4-digit number, which not only tells us who manufactured that device, but also a unique number of the vendor, which means beyond just Bubba with a dongle, the gov probably can tell exactly who you are, who bought this, and when. I.e., say you are in Taiwan, well, a lot of this is built in China, so even if they can’t read your messages, they can tell when your messages exist and that radio’s ID, which might lead to China knocking on the door of an occupied country and killing you and your family. Let’s continue with this network stuff, shall we, now that we know beyond Bubba most nations can find out who is TXing
Carrier-Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA)
Meshtastic adopts CSMA/CA, similar as to what is used in WiFi. This means that all transmitters must perform Channel Activity Detection (CAD) before attempting to transmit. If the channel is considered busy, the node will wait until it is not anymore. Since once the channel becomes idle multiple nodes might want to start transmitting, a node has to wait a random multiple of slot times. The slot time is the time needed to reliably perform CAD. The amount of slot times to wait is randomly picked from a contention window (CW), which size depends on the current channel utilization. The contention window is larger for a higher channel utilization, in order to limit the chance of collisions.
Explanation: Too much data flying around means your node has to wait for its turn, This means not all nodes transmit at once, like previously stated by our internet expert, who was a HAM operator. So again you can DF the damn things.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/
Much to the sadness of the fool who thinks these all TX at the same time, hiding your location, they really don’t talk with one another, allowing the Meshnetwork actually to jump one at a time.
Looking at when Meshtastic Transmits and the problems with this.
I will have someone quote who has DFed these things, and he explains exactly how this occurs, and go from there.
[LoRa, on the other hand, is intentionally designed to transmit a fair distance and does so on a schedule it decides, not you. And the protocol in use is apparent to anyone looking at the signal. Which means the force moving through your area now knows that there are at least two, and likely more, LoRa nodes in the area, and at least one of them will likely be in a fixed position, which can be DF’d. The device can then either be remotely exploited, or captured and exploited. Using a HT for CW or RTTY over UHF or VHF says, “oh, hey, they’ve got radios.” So does everyone else on the field. That’s not uncommon, or worth investigating, unless they’re doing something unusual.
Using something like LoRa says a whole lot more about what’s going on in that area, whether or not it, and any people in it, are of interest, is in some ways more vulnerable than plain, in-the-open CW, and is potentially more exploitable. Not to mention taking out comms requires little more than finding and neutralizing nodes. Taking out more traditional radio comms requires finding, and taking out, the RTOs, and capturing the radios. Funny thing about RTOs: Unlike little boxes doing their best bird impressions in trees, RTOs shoot back. To directly answer your question: What is more secure and has a smaller RF footprint? Not transmitting. Using sound discipline and methodology when one does. And then getting off the X. None of which is possible with a LoRa mesh, unless all nodes are mobile. And that is ridiculous, because you’re then talking about putting a node on many (most? all?) of your warfighters. Which will light up every member like a Christmas tree. COTS drones are, today, homing in on RF signals automatically. Carrying something that’s transmitting at (to the bearer) unknown times, for unknown durations, is a death sentence. You may as well shoot them in the head yourself. It’d be more merciful.] https://x.com/4nt1p4tt3rn/status/1773411209959678091
Now that we realize both the devices and how LoRa operates, we know the theory that all of the transmissions at once isn’t possible, and would overwhelm a system. If a person with a loop antenna or a yagi antenna, and some time on their hands, can DF these devices can find one node. Is it harder than a person talking on a repeater? Absolutely, but depending on the setting speed of the transmission and the network, this may be a lot of work or relatively little. Realistically, it’s easier to do this with a spectrum analyzer and some receiver or just with a device like the Kraken. This also becomes a major threat in other ways, which will be explained later, but the reality is, we can see on YouTube mesh network transmissions and what they look like below. This means it’s not only visually very easy to know what this is, but we also know the frequency it’s most likely going to be on, and if we are slightly savvy, we can also figure out who’s transmitting to whom. You may say that’s fine as long as they can’t read my messages, but I will disagree with you wholeheartedly. That’s a lot of information already, but we’ll pretend for the sake of argument that all of the above information doesn’t matter in this specific case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkFwwwJeako
Issues with Encryption
- Hacking
The encryption techniques that Mesh Tastic is based on are not my wheelhouse of information, but what I can say is that if there are issues with that encryption and it is online, you should be paying attention. But let’s examine the least likely path of someone getting your encrypted message into their hands. From what has been explained to me, this is basically a hacker’s realm of attack, which is understandable, as not everyone can do that. I will say that with this attack published, I guarantee you that anybody in the government who wants to read your messages will be able to get these messages. I’ll take it a step further, though.
https://cyberpress.org/severe-meshtastic-flaw/
- Acquiring a node
Another form of attack would be finding your mesh network and picking up one of your nodes. If I can grab one of your nodes and turn on the screen, which is generally not very hard, then I can read any message that that node has the key to read. I don’t even have to connect 2 the mesh tastic app to do this.
- Acquiring someone’s device
Once the mesh network transmits its message to the receiver, if that receiver is a phone, that phone can be hacked, stingrayed(hacked by government/LE/or illegal private citizens), and have your data scraped. Also, you could have been shot and the device taken, which now exposes EVERY encrypted node, and the kicker? Unlike a radio network, where I can quickly jump frequencies and change things up, meshtastic doesn’t have that ability. Someone has to get every node in hand and update it.
- Use your own node to see the signal strength and get a directional antenna.
Let’s say you don’t have any cool gadgets, but one mesh node and one directional antenna, which you either built yourself or purchased. You now have the ability to track signal strength. This means you can now move around and figure out both signal strength to nodes and do some map and compass work. If you don’t believe me, watch this video below. I will admit this is a lot harder than using a directional antenna, but you can use this technique with a directional antenna, and it is easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmrs0wcu5PA
What Meshtastic looks like
So, add to all the issues that we already have pointed out, let’s dive even deeper. One of the things pointed out by several of the people is the fact that when a grid down situation happens or a non-permissive environment, people will be listening to the airwaves, both friend and foe. Because mesh tastic is not only a unique system, it is very obvious when watched on a waterfall from an SDR or items like the tinySA ultra. Add to that the argument that you can “hide” your transmission because of other devices running on the same frequency is absolute BS. Below, you’ll be able to see and listen to what they sound like, so if you come across these things, you’ll know right away that somebody is transmitting text messages, which, in general terms, isn’t that shocking.
However, let’s say the whole network is down, things are getting sketchy and complex. Ambushes on law enforcement are happening by individuals who like to wear all black. It just so happens that the whole network of little mesh nodes in the region starts transmitting right before these attacks. An uneducated person who reads the guerrilla’s guide to signal intelligence will very quickly figure out that something is going on here, and because this signal is such a unique transmission, it is very hard to hide. Even if that transmission is not readable in real time. So if we drop everything else and all the attack vectors of this product and purely use a receiver, we can now know when opposition forces are actively communicating. We can see that with longer transmission times, the noise of the quick pings to make sure the network is still operating properly is still evident. If these people shut down most of the retransmission to keep their systems a little more secret, it’ll be even more obvious that something nefarious is going on. Let’s look at the signal before I move on
Video of what meshtastic looks/sounds like on an SDR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytr4yWl77NA
Meshtastic Settings
915 MHz (ISM Band)
The maximum output power for North America is +30 dBm Effective Radiated Power. This is essentially 1 watt of power, and this is a valuable skill to learn for survivalists and preppers that meshtastic does teach. It is one of the key points of this system that makes me very happy. You don’t need 100 watts of power to get a simple message; your antenna, some digital magic, can get you a range you wouldn’t see via FM handhelds, even if this is just text-only. So mesh does this right and it is one of the reasons so many people are interested in LoRa.
dBm to watts Conversion Chart
| Power (dBm) | Power (W) |
| -30 dBm | 0.000001 W |
| -20 dBm | 0.00001 W |
| -10 dBm | 0.0001 W |
| 0 dBm | 0.001 W |
| 1 dBm | 0.0012589 W |
| 2 dBm | 0.0015849 W |
| 3 dBm | 0.0019953 W |
| 4 dBm | 0.0025119 W |
| 5 dBm | 0.0031628 W |
| 6 dBm | 0.0039811 W |
| 7 dBm | 0.0050119 W |
| 8 dBm | 0.0063096 W |
| 9 dBm | 0.0079433 W |
| 10 dBm | 0.01 W |
| 20 dBm | 0.1 W |
| 30 dBm | 1 W |
| 40 dBm | 10 W |
| 50 dBm | 100 W |
NOTE : Channel is not referring to a channelized frequency like GMRS FRS of 60 meters. It is referring to what is basically a unique chatroom that is still on the same frequency everyone is on. See CDMA in this article to understand why this is important. LoRa Channels are different frequencies
The band range is from 902 to 928 MHz.
In North America, the available Frequency Slots depend on the bandwidth setting, which is included in the selected Radio Preset. The standard Preset, LongFast, provides 104 Frequency Slots. After a factory reset, the radio defaults to LongFast with a Frequency Slot of 0, which translates to Slot 20 (centered at 906.875 MHz) based on the channel hashing algorithm.
So, let’s step into the settings we have. This is here just to remind you what the data rate is for those who want to dive deeper into the information; it’s available. While this system allows texting it prevents audio for now. What does this mean overall for security? A select style of digital software, in a narrow bandwidth,
Data and Meshnetwork
| Radio Preset | Alt Preset Name | Data-Rate | SF / Symbols | Coding Rate | Bandwidth | Link Budget |
| Short Range / Turbo | Short Turbo | 21.88 kbps | 7 / 128 | 4/5 | 500 kHz1 | 140dB |
| Short Range / Fast | Short Fast | 10.94 kbps | 7 / 128 | 4/5 | 250 kHz | 143dB |
| Short Range / Slow | Short Slow | 6.25 kbps | 8 / 256 | 4/5 | 250 kHz | 145.5dB |
| Medium Range / Fast | Medium Fast | 3.52 kbps | 9 / 512 | 4/5 | 250 kHz | 148dB |
| Medium Range / Slow | Medium Slow | 1.95 kbps | 10 / 1024 | 4/5 | 250 kHz | 150.5dB |
| Long Range / Fast | Long Fast | 1.07 kbps | 11 / 2048 | 4/5 | 250 kHz | 153dB |
| Long Range / Moderate | Long Moderate | 0.34 kbps | 11 / 2048 | 4/8 | 125 kHz | 156dB |
| Long Range / Slow | Long Slow | 0.18 kbps | 12 / 4096 | 4/8 | 125 kHz | 158.5dB |
The fastest your AOL dial-up ever ran at about 56 kbps, and you may not be old enough to remember this, but images and webpages took seconds to fully load. So now that this is pointed out, this is why mesh networks are relegated to almost purely text-based messaging.
Let’s talk about another thing pushed by people who want to play COD in real life. ATAK. That is a WHOLE massive can of worms from who developed it, to people putting it on phones, but let’s discuss a major issue with this and meshtastic. ATAK has a ton of features, but those features aren’t always possible on Meshtastic because of the bandwidth needs. Many people try to set up their network on the longer range settings, killing data rate, which causes something called packet collision. Realistically, ATAK is best used at Short Range/Turbo mode, but again, this is basically dial-up speed comms, and that means a lot more nodes you need to network all the data. If your lines can’t be infiltrated and your nodes can’t be compromised, and your tablet/cellphone can’t be hacked, then this might be a very awesome secure system, but there are too many holes; more nodes mean more people can snag a node and attack it. This doesn’t even bring up the issues with ATAK, which I will leave to smarter men.
Range realism vs advertised
The realistic distance between Meshtastic devices varies significantly based on environmental factors, but typical ranges are between 1-2 kilometers (0.6-1.2 miles) in urban environments and potentially several kilometers in more open areas. Factors like line of sight, obstructions (buildings, trees), antenna type, and even weather conditions heavily influence the achievable range
Russians DFing Jammers
One of the nuances that is missing from this discussion is the direction finding. Regardless of what you are trying to direction find and how many of those devices are being tracked at one time or transmitting at one time, there will always be a stronger source. This means as you move closer to that stronger source, you will find whatever is transmitting there, and in this case, that would be a meshtastic node. While not being used to attack mesh networks, you can see where the Russians and the Ukrainians have made drones specifically to track down jamming devices of various sorts, and that also means generally in a warfare situation, if jamming is going on, it’s more than one jamming transmitter operating at one time. Regardless of whether it’s a HARM (anti-radiation) missile or a drone set up to track onto a jammer, these devices will go straight towards the strongest signal they can find.
I’m not going to go into great detail on how to track something down because the real point is, if you haven’t read the gorilla’s guide to signals intelligence at this point, and you have any conversational awareness of prepping and radios, you’re far behind the power curve. If you take some of Scout’s classes as well, you will track down several different transmitters, including many civilian devices that might be the baseline of your area. In lower wetland areas around cities, you will find that there are a lot of devices that are transmitting data, such as water height on a pumping station. These devices all transmit and connect to a network, which tells operators or an automated system what pumps should be turned on and off remotely. This is no different than a mesh network on LoRa. A simple loop antenna or even a yagi means that mesh networks are difficult but not some super stealth network when it comes to hiding. I also know several places are going to medium long transmissions to bolster the network’s connectivity. Add software like ATAK and your network will be very busy updating locations etc for everyone causing lots of signal.
Video of Drone tracking a jammer
https://x.com/GrandpaRoy2/status/1905276851880337724
https://x.com/RealAndersonBen/status/1946632556851650810
I’m a ham and deep into Meshtastic and know all about the Kraken. Show it working to track Meshtastic. When one packet gets sent out, dozens of radios instantly repeat it on the same frequency. Show me the Kraken singling just one out. It can’t.]
Some individuals believe that one can’t DF a node because all nodes transmit at once. This is patently false and so purely wrong that there is now a setting to make it harder (not impossible) to direction find a node. Add to that this bright shining beacon of “I am a HAM” stopped replying at the point I showed the software tries its best to prevent DFing if set up correctly. The failure with this is the above issue, where you need multiple nodes to transmit reliably in a grid-down Non-Permissive Environment. I thought about actually sending him a thank you for this because he made me really work and see all the issues with meshtastic that I really hadn’t dug deeply in to this topic because so many have warned me about them with various factual answers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x99R78fkSg0
In the video above, at 10:08, you see Hidden Client, so as this individual claims he needs to see someone do it, the reality is this setup is already baked in because it is fairly trackable.
Let’s also not overlook the fact that a white paper exists on utilizing LoRa signals as a directional beacon.
https://ut3-toulouseinp.hal.science/hal-03693641/document
[Performance Evaluation of the Angle of Arrival of LoRa Signals under Interference Several DoA techniques have been developed and proposed in the literature to determine the location of a node based on This work is supported by the Femto-st institute in collaboration with Jolliet-Innovation and SECA companies in the framework of the SYLOIN FEDER BPI Project. AoA. The most common DoA techniques include spectralbased techniques such as the Capon Beamforming method [1], typical techniques such as Maximum Likelihood (ML) [2], and subspace decomposition methods. Subspace decomposition methods include the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) [3] technique and the Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Technique (ESPIRIT) [4]. However, the implementation of these techniques is complex and expensive because it requires multiple receivers, as well as synchronization between these receivers. Performance Evaluation of the Angle of Arrival of LoRa Signals under Interference.] Perhaps you need a video because you’re a “HAM” and can’t grasp the basics: if it puts out a signal, regardless of whether everything else does, it can be found.]Going even one more step, I can take my nodes, turn them on, and use them to find other nodes that may not even have my encryption by just looking at the decibel rating I’m receiving from those other nodes as they either transmit or retransmit information in the area. Mesh networks of this low output talk in decimals instead of watts, and this means that with a few people, you can directionally find specific nodes because of the above information that is unique to each individual node alone. This means if I have a few people moving in a certain direction, they know if they’re getting hotter or colder from a specific node. This is probably one of the only reasons I would even think about having one of these devices on hand, but the issue comes into play when you turn one of these on, all of the unique issues are now in the palm of your hands as well.
This guy had the balls to reply to a very long thread with this gem, “I live in reality, not in theory. Do it for real.”
https://x.com/RealAndersonBen/status/1946834505635172410
Knowing all the above, let’s consider some more points. Without a doubt, you can see that it is trackable, can be found, and possibly hacked by COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) individuals with basic knowledge, rather than advanced degrees and supercomputers. Let’s see why the real-world use of this technology isn’t seen in the best pressure cooker, a real war.
It was reported that 200 Ukrainian soldiers died because of ATAK leaks, which could have been from a compromise by various means, from someone getting access to the server, to social engineering access. The issue isn’t just ATAK, or they broke into the system specifically. The fact is that the damn thing is always making noise and pinging to keep the network going, which is the primary issue with all mesh networks in the first place. So we don’t know for a fact if the Russians hacked the server, got a node, and reversed its encryption or used one of the other various attack vectors into this system, but what we do know is Caliber missiles blew that training facility away and killed a lot of people. I can’t think of anything more terrible then your own super cool tech getting you smoked because you don’t understand it well enough to not realize this is not only possible but probable.
Link to article referenceing the incident.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/lviv-foreign-fighters-ukraine/
Let’s not ignore the article NCScout wrote because he knows his way around this, and forgive him if you ever ask about Meshtastic, the man has warned and warned yet so many still look at these devices.
[Whenever I see certain pieces of equipment being marketed…let’s take ATAK for a prime example…I become immediately leery. ATAK, or the android tactical awareness kit, marketed by a company called “Guerrilla Dynamics”, utilizes android phones to create an inter-team mesh network. In short, it creates the ‘virtual battlefield’ that a Commander can micromanage individual team members or assets on the ground. But what they won’t tell you in the marketing is that we’ve been hunting and killing people based on cell phone data for two decades now. Yay, the capitalism of the Military Industrial Complex. Further, they fail in telling that the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance drones fielded by every nation’s conventional forces includes a spectrum analyzer looking for said mesh networking signals. It becomes a very easy target. All of the ever more impressive levels of encryption do not defeat the physics of RF signals.]So not only do we have him, we have the after effects of idiots with cellphones, and my god, do we have people who love putting ATAK on cellphones, which caused so many casualties during this war that I can’t begin to explain to you how bad of an idea they are in the first place. If you want to see the problems with cellphones, read this X thread, and you will see why you should hate them more than anything else related to this meshtastic system.
https://x.com/TaranQ/status/1674128668128411648
I have a wedding to get to so I am going to end with a few more links and very little discussion. This article has been in the can for weeks because every time I review my article, more issues come to light. Just like the video below discussing how to stop giving away your specific GPS location, this networking system just isn’t good for preppers and should be run from if you are in a warfare environment. It has its values for a massive list of other things, education, and off big tech network texting. Even though with the 256-bit encryption, the weakness comes from people connecting cellphones to operate nodes. I didn’t even go into how nodes not updated will be just out of sync; they won’t talk to each other, which means consistent updating the network.
Realistically, someday someone will eventually make a mesh-like system for combat that is both effective and relatively safe. No matter what radio you use, transmitting anything is always a gamble, and the only things not getting you killed are knowledge, training to hide your footprint to the adversary, and terrain location of transmission. I did a bunch of research into Spec5, owned by Amir Husain, who seems to want to sell nodes for overly high prices and put a lot of Facebook ads out to select communities. I don’t think he is evil, just greedy, but you do some research on this “American” who was born in Punjab, Pakistan, if you wish. I won’t speculate, but I don’t think his goal is to further safety and security with mesh. You guys have a great time during the start of the training season. I will definitely be comms dark online for a month. Check out all the great classes being done from TCCC at the G-camp www.brushbeater.store , to TEAM-1 classes in late Sep and Oct. https://www.team1tacticsolutions.com/book-online GO TRAIN meet in meat space like I will be doing with my new wife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z8_-EVwizw&t=306s
Dfing loop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgOg83QaXd8
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About the Author: Patriotman
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