[#]Meshtastic #ham #amateurradio #Daytonahamfest #lora
Wew so a BUSY weekend. I took my Meshtastic node to Dayton Hamfest, and looking for filters and equipment. Had some good and bad. But first, Meshtastic!
I arrive on Friday around 9am, bad rain. Wew. I get to site, and I start seeing dozens, then hundreds of contacts over LoRa. I made a mistake, and I didn't even know I did: I had MQTT on, and channel upload/download enabled.
I inadvertently caused a packet storm and 30% LoRa utilization for everyone on msh/US/IN !
I was alerted a fellow user who is also on the Meshtastic discord what was happening, and was able to turn off MQTT and up/downloads.
That was the first problem, averted.
Second problem is with the Android app. Frankly, the display of messaging is not good. The attached image is a good explanation why:
The screen shows the 4 character short code INSTEAD of the node name. Using the short name only is completely unintelligible especially when talking with a crowd that's basically a simplex frequency. Half of the overall convos was "who are you?"
The chat interface sorely needs to be able to provide longname, shortname, and/or nodeID ,user selectable.
It's also clear that there's also little parity with Apple Meshtastic and Android Meshtastic apps. Apple supports emojis, and Android shows the Unicode junk, but it's inconsistent.
I thought Meshtastic would be useful there in the large group, but it kinda wasn't.
I could easily see this being absolutely useful if I had went with friends and we communicated with it. But, we all also have cell phones and have to use it anyways.
I still think it's very useful. Part of the problem is with the Android app. It's also something I've never done, so I'd be more a hindrance than a help until I get up to snuff on it.
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