With some regular members away it was a quiet but nonetheless interesting meeting. JJ demonstrated his new Meshtastic devices which are like FT8 in that the mode can achieve impressive range on a matter of milliwatts, in our case tonight almost 10km with a tiny stubby antenna sitting on a table inside the classroom. And Meshtastic on Lora hardware is like Tasmota on ESP devices – it adds a managed communications framework that allows sensors and output devices to be easily added.
Commercially it’s used for purposes like environmental monitoring around large sites, but in our context it’s something of a solution waiting for a problem.