I've been taking CERT disaster relief (DR) classes, put on by the city at the local fire department (we live in an area prone to earthquake, flood, and fire). The subject of communications came up and they mentioned walkie talkies in neighborhood caches, but nobody had any idea about models, ranges, etc.
Been casually looking at Meshtastic and keep seeing it mentioned for DR, but haven't come across any actual guides or implementations. For example, I can set up a router in my house, but there's no guarantee it will be standing during a fire, or if power will remain during an earthquake.
There are lots of questions (tech, redundancy, battery backups, range, node placement, while on-the-move, temporary setups, gateways to cell and cloud, etc). Was hoping someone had already figured it out so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. This would be first for my own neighborhood, then expand to city or county-wide services.
I've got another CERT class coming up next week and will ask the Fire Department folks for tips/advice as well, but thought I'd ask here about Meshtastic and maybe point them at some resources, if asked.
For research, am making my way through posts on the Meshtastic site and read the Burning Man report. Also checked out Meshmap in my area (only two routers, one on top of a mountain, but possibly on the back side of it).
FWIW, background in tech, have a ton of ESP32s, RPis, and a few LoRa boards sitting around. Was looking at getting the T-Deck, but am going to hold off until I have a proper plan on what to do with it. Also want to document the process so hopefully come up with a reusable plan. Mainly looking for tips where to look next. TIA.
Thanks for the tip, will also look into ARES.
I've only taken one of the CERT classes. Will have another next week and am signed up for three more. My understanding is that CERT is targeted at civilians who form a neighborhood first response team in case official services are inaccessible or stretched thin.
The material leans heavily toward self-help (medical triage, food/water/medicine caches, etc) until help arrives. My thinking was the official channels already have access to UHF/VHF for their own comms. But CERT trainers kept repeating that if a big disaster hits, neighborhood groups should plan to make do for 10 days (and maybe up to 30) before outside help can come in.
Assuming 10 days without power, gas, or water and maybe closed roads, seemed like Meshtastic might be a good way to coordinate inside these neighborhood groups and across them.
The LilyGo T-Deck (https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck?variant=44907372413109) with a 3D printed or IP-66/67 enclosure seems like an inexpensive civilian-friendly device to offer CERT groups without requiring a radio license. But the repeater network needs to be there and configured for redundancy. TBH, I don't know if it's a good solution, but I'm going to ask the instructors this week if there are any alternatives already in place. Meanwhile, I'm trying to learn as much as I can (hence the post).
Yah, out here, there's one set of frequencies on the government bands for the officials to use and then ARES/RACES has a set of frequencies in the ham band that we'd plan on using. And, yah, the whole thing about all of community resilience is that it lets them focus more closely on fighting the problem where presumably the more interesting things we'd do is windshield surveys from a car or communications between the ARK's (caches) and POD's (points of distribution).
All of this depends on your geography? There's one the need to have a communicator in a neighborhood, and there's a separate need, maybe, for within the neighborhood.
So, for anything of medium density up, if you have a person or two in a park or other public space with a radio and a clipboard and a yellow vest, people will assume that's the communicator? The case where either FRS/GPRS radios or T-Decks (or both) come in handy is when you can't assume people are going to hit up the public space. And, again, having a trained communicator helps prevent the official and community services from getting overwhelmed. The local ARES/RACES has a defined standard way of using the Modified Mercali scale to collect information quickly in the aftermath of an earthquake, if everybody's telling their stories there's not necessarily actionable information.
Depending on geography, height does play a role. The higher-level better-trained communicators have extendable fiberglass tower thingies to get the antenna 25 feet up in the air. So you might be able to have a solar-battery meshtastic relay on a boom? Couple that with potentially some number of regular meshtastic nodes with fixed installs on buildings...?
And, on the lines of the formwork being something Meshtastic is good at, things like making it easy to collect M-M earthquake values is another potential thing?
Excellent insights. You've given me a lot more new things I've never heard of to look up and investigate (ARES, ARK, POD).
There's a registered Meshtastic node near me that places it on the side of a mountain in an open space. Going to get in touch with them. It has line of sight to half the city from that high up.
I'm going to use all this info to find out what the local municipality has already set up for DR at the next CERT class. Also what gaps need to be filled. Lots more to learn.
Much appreciate all the info. Anyone reading this, please keep it coming.