If you need to communicate with people in your area and not be tracked; MeshCore software with LoRa hardware like the this https://lilygo.cc/en-ca/products/t-lora-pager is something to consider. Text only, completely offline
If you need to do this then start by figuring out why you need to do it, and adjust your approach too your threat model.
Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.
Turning on any sort of radio transmitter is just turning on a big flash light into the sky.
Turning on anything relatively uncommon is even worse: normal people have cellphones and use them. They don't use LoRa devices, there aren't a lot of LoRa devices and someone who only uses LoRa devices will stand out in any dataset.
> Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.
How many cameras did you just go by? did you have your cell phone on you? how many networks did it connect too? how many bluetooth broadcasts did it passively send out? Not being tracked and being in public are slowly becoming an untenable duo.
Yes!!! I've been wanting to make something like this for a long time. But unless the firmware is open source I wouldn't trust this for anything secure. But this looks like a dev kit so I can do whatever I want.
I’ve tried them on snowmobile trails. With the vegetation the range was about a mile.
Range can be 100+ miles though if you can establish line of sight. Depending on the scenario, a high elevation repeater could give several mobile devices pretty significant range.
Range is line of sight. If you can see it, even if 100 miles away, odds are it'll work. Seattle area has one of the better networks for MeshCore. Tacoma to Vancouver BC is the range for semi reliable messaging
Yes you can get decent reception inside buildings. It operates in the 915mhz band. Similar frequencies to old school pagers. Lora is an interesting RF protocol, it has really good properties for operating below the noise floor.
not really. The prohibition on encryption/obfuscation is how you keep abusers off the frequencies.
If you run into someone who is regularly
- using encryption, obfuscation
- failing to identify with a callsign
- using lots of bandwidth
- doing some sort of commercial activity.
then you get a group together, track them down, and report them to the FCC.
The thing people forget is that the primary goal of the ham system is to promote radio experience and experimentation. That is why there is such a wide variety of frequencies available.
Yes. Details are in the Christie's auction listing linked above. Scroll down to read the very interesting article about the Apple 1 in general and specifics about this particular machine.
There were also a number of sound cards that had two or three ports because a lot of early CD-ROM drives weren’t IDE. You’d have a Sony, a Panasonic, and something else on your card in the early days. IDE on a sound card was an actual improvement.
Wouldn't it surpass the flicker if you're recording at 60fps and the lights flicker at a multiple of that (ex. 120Hz in the USA)? At least that's my experience recording CRT monitors - you set it to a multiple of its refresh rate and the flicker is gone from the video.
I used this method to check some of the lights in my house a few years ago.
The slow-mo video mode on my phone used a rolling shutter which captures one row of pixels at a time, meaning you could see the flicker in part of the video, even when it’s a multiple of 60 Hz or above 240 Hz. The flicker and camera frequencies also aren’t exactly synced up, so you can see the dimmed parts move across the screen.
You can get a pretty good idea of frequency, depth of flicker, and if the LED’s colors are flickering in sync from this, and I can confirm that Philips LEDs, specifically the EyeComfort series, are good.
EDAN gives you a fast, accurate snapshot of whether your program really benefits from faster memory or extra cache. You get clear signals on where latency matters and where it doesn’t using just one ordinary program run and a bit of smart analysis.
Kids text only cell phone. LILYGO T-Deck Plus. I can track and communicate with them and not have to worry about giving them full internet.
Any sort of disaster they also are useful to get messages around. A couple days into a power outage and no cell towers work anymore, this happened 1 week before thanksgiving in the Seattle area 2024.
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