SURVIVAL APPSI Power It All Up and See If It Holds
There are more machines in the workshop than I can switch on in a single evening: the cyberdeck, still half built, an oracle made of glass and salvaged motors waiting for its turn to speak, and now this black box with the antenna, pulled out of the drawer one last time before I write. Each of them has a piece of me inside, and each, once powered up, seems to remember it.
The tracker was never meant to live on its own: it's a graft for the radio that will one day have to speak when the internet stops answering anyone. Tonight, though, I kept it separate on purpose, running on the table, to look it in the eye before walling it up inside something else.
Why I wrote an interface of my own
The official Meshtastic app works, and I still keep it on my phone for when I'm out. But once the tracker sits still on a desk, hauling it around on the phone all the time starts to feel pointless: I want a big screen, I want to keep an eye on it while I work on something else, I want it to stay open without asking me to unlock something every time. So I wrote my own, in Python and a few lines of JavaScript, built to stay on at a desk instead of in a pocket.
This device already got switched on once on this blog, the day of the first unboxing. Today I turned it on again for a different reason: not to get to know it, but to actually use it, the way anyone who buys it after me would.
The first run, start to finish
I connect the tracker by cable and open the browser on a page I know by heart, yet today I look at it differently. The first screen tells the state of the unit: how much battery is left, how long it's been on, how much channel it's using while talking to the mesh[1]. Further down, a small radar draws concentric circles dotted with green: those are the people the tracker can hear right now, placed by direction and real distance, with next to each one how clean their signal arrives[2] and how many hops[3] it takes to reach them.
> interfaccia: locale, http://localhost:8787
> mesh visibile: 81 nodi
> stato: OPERATIVO
It does something to you, watching that radar fill up while you sit still on a chair: real silence around the house doesn't exist. Somebody is always transmitting, somewhere within radio range, even when you don't know it.
Who's out there
If the radar is a snapshot, the tab next to it is the same list in full: name, declared hardware, signal quality, number of hops, how long ago each node last made itself heard. There's a search box at the top, and clicking a node opens its full card, with only the conversation I've had with it — nothing to scroll past in the middle of everything else.
On the day of this test the mesh counted eighty-one visible nodes. Eighty-one, and I hadn't gone looking for a single one: they were all already there, before I'd even switched anything on.
What it's for, besides looking good
The difference from the phone app shows most when I want to go back in time: the tracker's tiny screen shows one message at a time and then forgets it, while here the conversation stays saved and I find it intact even days later, even after switching everything off and on again. It shows when I want to know whether someone far away is still reachable: I just open their card and press a button, instead of remembering a command and their exact address by heart. And it shows in the small things, like those technical labels that would otherwise take a ham radio course: here you just hover over them with the mouse, and the explanation pops up by itself.
There's a deeper reason, if I think about it, and it's the one that holds together everything I write on this site: on a really bad day, a single glance at the first screen would tell me whether the radio is still alive; a single glance at the second would tell me who, right now, could hear me. Neither would have to go through a phone to unlock or an app to wait for.
Testing your own radio is a bit like talking to yourself in front of a mirror and finding out it answers. The construct, if it was watching too, said nothing — but there were more voices on the radar than I had invited.
Notes
- Channel use — how much of the available radio bandwidth is taken up, by your device and by all the other nodes on the mesh at the same time: the higher it climbs, the greater the risk of collisions between messages. ↑ back to text
- SNR — signal-to-noise ratio: how "clean" a radio signal arrives compared to the background hiss. Higher (or less negative) values mean better reception. ↑ back to text
- Hop — the number of intermediate nodes a message passes through, relay-style, before reaching its destination: it's how a mesh extends range beyond that of a single device. ↑ back to text
- EUROPE & UK —
EU_868(868 MHz) - USA & CANADA —
US(915 MHz) - AUSTRALIA —
ANZ(915 MHz) - NEW ZEALAND —
NZ_865(865 MHz)