←back to thread

Taking a Radio Camping

(ewpratten.com)
139 points ewpratten | 2 comments | 27 Jul 24 02:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
solardev ◴[28 Jul 24 07:15 UTC] No.41091742[source]▶
Can anyone recommend something (as in radio type or particular device) for relatively portable battery based comms between two hiking groups? The use case is a big group hike that often gets separated into two or more smaller groups walking at different speeds, but wanting to still be able to check in with each other every so often. There's no cell reception out there.

Basically just want a glorified walkie talkie with a bit more range (a few miles through woods and across hills of possible).

I just got my GMRS license and some cheap 5W handhelds to experiment with, but I'm not sure if that is the best option.

We might also have the option of setting up a "base station" at the trailhead (our cars or someone relaxing at a picnic table) to act as a higher powered repeater if that would help.

How much of it is frequency (radio type), wattage, line of sight, operator skill. etc.?

replies(2): >>41092963 #>>41094623 #
yhtblitr ◴[28 Jul 24 17:35 UTC] No.41094623[source]▶
You might want to check out lora devices like Meshtastic.

https://meshtastic.org/

replies(1): >>41096530 #
1. solardev ◴[28 Jul 24 22:42 UTC] No.41096530[source]▶
This is interesting, thank you! It seems like LoRa operates in the UHF frequencies, and is an encoding scheme for data packets...? Does that encoding system also affect its usable range, or can any two radios in the same frequency generally send/receive over those distances?

A 50kb/s bit rate is fast enough for texting, but I guess it'd take some specialized voice protocols to do a walkie-talkie over that.

Regardless, thank you for sharing.

replies(1): >>41102636 #
2. livueta ◴[29 Jul 24 18:37 UTC] No.41102636[source]▶
You can trade range for bandwidth by playing with the spread factor, an encoding tunable: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#modem-...

But generally yes, latency is too high and bandwidth is too low for synchronous voice. The upside is that real-world performance often exceeds the range of analog UHF even at significantly lower frequencies, e.g. GMRS.