MANET Radios: Getting Started

The world is changing and the future of warfare is changing, too. A series of wars has broken out from Eastern Europe to Western Asia and new and horrifying classes of weapons have, in some cases, erased the concepts of front lines. Troops and civilians thousands of miles behind the lines now suddenly find themselves in the heart of combat, sometimes with zero notice. In the 19th century, oceans were battlefields. In the 20th century, the skies became battlegrounds, too. And in the 21st century, the oceans, skies, and space itself are the front lines and technological advancements have made autonomous and unmanned systems a mainstay of modern war. But these tools are just the more kinetic arm of a much wider war. In this data-driven era of warfare, sensors and communications can sometimes become even more important than small arms or crew-served weapons. Every combat zone is different, but in many cases, having an extra 10 minutes of warning that a missile is headed your way might be more valuable than the type of optic on your rifle. But what if you never got that warning because the Amazon data center in Dubai gets hit, zapping the internet connection to the region, taking your hotel offline just a few minutes before the drone slams into the building? You have no idea what's going on. You can't communicate with anyone. You are completely hopeless and in the dark. Clearly, from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf, the future prepared citizen needs to get serious about ensuring rugged and resilient communications links. Not to just have the upper edge in combat, but also to reduce the effects of fifth-generation warfare and the information war that comes with it. Even back here in the civilian world, where we don't have to worry about missile threats just yet, knowing what is around you has become increasingly more important for the prepared citizen. It might not even be a missile you're dodging. Natural disasters, media censorship, cyberattacks, and civil unrest are all very likely to disrupt communications infrastructure at the exact moment it's needed the most. And when the chips are down and everything is failing, how are you going to have the information you need to be an asset when you're needed the most? Today, we find ourselves at a juncture, a technological crossroads of sorts, where groundbreaking advancements are being made in many different ways. Drones and unmanned platforms are only as good as the communications infrastructure behind it all, and managing this incredibly complex battle space is not easy. And it's even harder when you're getting shot at. For the prepared citizen, we have the advantage of passively being able to learn about these technologies and implement them over the years, which has allowed us to punch well above our weight in protecting our communities and our homeland. However, one major shortfall has been the world of communications, and what we have right now is not good enough. The amateur radio space, while certainly appreciated and very useful for low-level tasks, cannot handle complicated data links, camera feeds, team management tools, or signals intelligence equipment, or any of the other tools that make us a force multiplier in our communities. Digital radio options themselves are getting better, and high-frequency radio can help us stay informed around the world, but sometimes we need to send a lot of data between a smaller team in a local area. We need encryption, bare minimum, and we need a lot more capability than ham radio can provide, sometimes when seconds count. One of the unique tools that might help us get toward our goals is the Open Manet project. So, today we're going to set up a couple of radios to show how this technology can be used to give us some serious capabilities and help solve problems when everything is failing and we have to go to work. Chances are, if you're watching this, you have probably heard of mesh radios. You have probably discovered the Persistent Systems MPU5 or the Silvus Streamcaster, which are the two main Manet radios that currently dominate the internet, even if there is a lot of uncertainty regarding what these tools can actually do. As always, we want to match a tool to a capability, and not the other way around. We don't want to use something just because it looks cool. We want to use tools because they actually fit a need. So, what are Manet radios and what can they do? Why would anyone be interested in them, and what capabilities do they offer over standard analog or digital radios? First of all, the name Manet is an acronym that stands for mobile ad hoc network. There is also quite a vicious debate as to how it's pronounced. Some say Manet, others say Manay, but for today I will use Manet. Simply put, these are a class or a type of radio that are basically tiny computers that can do a lot of different stuff. At their core, these are IP radios, meaning that they don't just send a simple analog or digital signal like most other handheld radios or walkie-talkies you see in the store. These things essentially create their own local Wi-Fi network, which allows a lot of data to be sent between them. The other differences are that these radios operate on a self-healing mesh topology, so that all of the nodes talk to each other all of the time. And as long as one node can maintain a link to one other node, that radio can talk to all of the other nodes by hopping from one radio to the next. You couple this capability with these mostly being issued to special forces and thus always visible in really iconic photos, and you have a lot of people on the internet thinking that they need something like this even if they don't really fully understand how IP mesh radios work. However, they are also usually dismayed to find out that these radios are not exactly easy to get. And though the sales reps are very eager to sell them to you, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a pair of radios is not something that most people can do. This is where the Open Man project comes in. This project is a way to duplicate a lot of the capabilities of those more expensive military-grade radios within the open-source world and at a much cheaper cost. Over the years, this class of radio ecosystem has gone from extremely niche to a full project that is actually viable to use in the real world and not just on the workbench. Now, this does not mean that we can replace a $30,000 radio with a Raspberry Pi and that the US military is just stupid for buying Silvus radios. That is very clearly not true, and any claims that are made that a DIY option can beat out a StreamCaster or MPU5, these are just clickbait. The professional-grade radios have a lot of proprietary technology inside them, anti-jam, anti-direction finding capabilities, a lot of special networking options within them, and all of the internals for these radios are done vastly better than anything that we have on the open civilian market. What we have just cannot compete. The Open Man project does not seek to replace what's possible using dedicated mannet radios. We cannot duplicate this perfectly no matter how hard we try, but we might be able to get close enough. For me personally, I would love to have a whole fleet of MPU5s or Streamcasters because they fit my needs perfectly for the various projects that I'm working on, but it's just too expensive. That price is my hard limit when there are so many other things that are needed in my line of work. So, my line of thinking is that I acknowledge that there is no way I can build an MPU 5 at home and get the same capability as a dedicated mannet radio, but I might be able to get 50% of that capability at less than 1% of the overall cost. To me, that is an acceptable ratio and why it's worth looking into the open mannet project to see if it fits your needs. How does open mannet work? Now that enough mystery has been built up around these radios, what is actually going on under the hood? Well, when it comes to the open mannet project, it's not special because it's a new technology. It's special because we now have computer chips that are small enough to make this man portable and powerful enough to send a lot of data. The core of this project lies within the Halo Wi-Fi standard. This is an older Wi-Fi protocol which has found a renewed use for this purpose because it offers much longer range than traditional Wi-Fi. This is also a major difference between the open mannet side of things and the professional world of Persistent Systems. The professional companies have proprietary waveforms, meaning that they have the patent on how these signals fly through the air, and because of that, they're able to tailor things a lot more specially. They don't need an open standard. They can use something that they've already patented, and if they are building chips for military use, they don't have to have the frequency restrictions that we do in the civilian world. We'll get more into the frequency part of this later on, but for right now, let's talk basics. Remember, there is no free lunch in the world of communications. Everything is a trade-off. Either you get a lot of data, but a short range, or a long range, but not as much data. This is partly why we now have 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and 5 GHz Wi-Fi on most modern routers these days. 2.4 GHz has more range, but 5 GHz offers a faster connection and more channels for more devices to connect to it. And depending on how your house is set up, you may need to use one or the other to get a stable connection. You may want to have your gaming PC or console decently close to the Wi-Fi router on 5 GHz, but you might also have a laptop in the back room on the far side of the house, which can only see the 2.4 GHz connection. Well, the Halo standard allows devices to communicate not over 2.4 GHz, not over 5 GHz, but actually way down at 900 MHz, the same general region of the electromagnetic spectrum that Meshtastic and Mesh Core use. It's not the same frequencies, but it's close. This is not a perfect analogy, so software engineers cover your ears for a second, but in practice, this is how it works. You flash some firmware to a device, much like you would do with Meshtastic or Mesh Core. The difference is this device is much different than those two. You then take your phone and connect to this device like it's a Wi-Fi access point. From there, the device will link up to other devices using an antenna and a special chip using the Halo Wi-Fi standard. If another phone is connected to its own radio device, these two devices are now connected through this network and can exchange a lot of data between them over much longer ranges than you might think. In effect, these two nodes are forming essentially a long-range wireless Ethernet cable between these two phones so that they are all on the same network together. This sounds complicated, but if you've ever used a Wi-Fi extender or a Wi-Fi bridge to bring an internet connection to an outbuilding or something, this is basically the same way this works. With a few changes, it's not quite the same, but that's generally the gist of it. The Wi-Fi Halo standard allows us to cheat a little bit by offering lower data throughput, but longer range. Again, there's no cheating physics. So, with the very wave top-level explanation out of the way, let's dive into the hardware needed to see if we can get an experimental network set up. In most cases, you will find most people using a Raspberry Pi for this project, but today I am going to be using a newer pre-built device for this task, the Heltec HT-HD01 V2 Halo Wi-Fi Bridge. These devices are extremely underpowered for this, but since they only cost $138 for a pair of them at the time of [snorts] this recording, at this price point, we're still in the realm of what many pre-built Meshtastic devices run for, and these devices will do a lot more than Meshtastic and Mesh Core will. In terms of hardware, that's basically all you need to get started. You will need some way to power these devices, so you will need a couple of USB-C cables if you don't already have them, and some sort of energy source. In my case, I'm using power banks. Once we have the hardware in hand, we can get started with the flashing and setup process. The first step is to go to the Open Manet help guide for setting up this device and opening up this webpage in a separate internet browser window. This is helpful to follow along with because when we get connected to the Heltec device, we will be switching off our Wi-Fi access point and will lose our internet connection. So, we want to kind of have it in a pre-cached window so that we can work off of it. You can use your phone for this entire process. Technically, you don't need a laptop or a PC, but I would prefer it for this first time just because it's easier to use and you're prone to making less mistakes. We also need the firmware file itself, which can be found on the GitHub page for the Open Manet project. This can be a bit tricky to find because we need to scroll down and open up the assets of each version release to find recent firmware version for our specific device. As of the recording of this video, the March 18th release of version 1.6.5 is the most recent firmware package that we need. Make absolutely sure that the file name contains Heltec that we need. Click the link and save this firmware to your phone or computer. Next, we can prep the hardware. Take the first Heltec node out of the box and attach the the As with all radios, we never want to power on the device without an antenna being attached because this might harm the radio in ways we can't really predict. We also want to verify that the device we have is indeed the HT-HD01 Halo Dongle V2. If it does not say V2 anywhere, you have the wrong device. You have to make absolutely certain that it's the V2 model because none of this will work otherwise, and if you flash the wrong firmware, you will brick this device. Once we have verified that we have the right device, plug it into a power source using the USB-C cable. You can plug it right into a power bank if you want, it doesn't really matter what power source you use. Once plugged in, you will have to wait 2 to 3 minutes for the node to power on. Remember, this is just a little guy, and it doesn't have a lot of processing power on board, so it takes a while to start up. From here, we can begin the flashing process, and we are just going to work down the installation guide. So, if you don't want me to walk you through this, you don't have to. You can just read the guide and do it yourself. On your desktop, you will see the Heltec device advertising itself as a Wi-Fi access point. Connect to that and use the default password of heltec.org to join. Once connected, click the little information bubble in the Wi-Fi menu to bring up the settings for this device. We need to know the IP address that has been assigned to this device so that we can log into it. We are looking for something that says IPv4 default gateway. This is the local IP address that the dongle is using to host its main admin portal. Copy that and paste that IP address into an internet browser. After a little bit of time loading, you will be brought to the Heltec admin page where you can log in. The default username is root, and the password is again heltec.org. Once logged in, you can click away any pop-ups and find the system tab on the left side of the screen. From this drop-down menu, click the option that says reset or flash firmware. Click the purple flash image button and then browse. This will open up your downloads folder where you downloaded the firmware to. Select that OpenWrt firmware file, click open, and then upload. This will upload the file to the dongle itself to stage it for installation. As it completes, make sure to uncheck the keep settings option and select force upgrade and click continue. Now you have to wait. These Heltec devices are again pretty underpowered, so it might take upwards of 5 to 10 minutes for the firmware to flash. Once the flashing part is complete, we need to reconnect to this device because the name of the hotspot and the IP address will have changed, so we need to find out what the new IP address is. We should see a Wi-Fi hotspot called openmanet, which we can connect to like a regular Wi-Fi hotspot once again, and using openmanet as the password, we can connect our computer to this device. Once again, using the little trick of clicking the exclamation point, you should be brought to the properties page of this specific Wi-Fi point. Just in case you aren't, it's under settings, network and internet, Wi-Fi, and then the name of the device in this case is openmanet. Once again, what we are looking for is the same thing as before, IPv4 default gateway. Whatever IP address that is, it will be different for you. Grab that and paste it in an internet browser so that we can begin the process of logging into the openmanet node and configuring some settings. You can log in using root as the username, and the default password is once again openmanet. Now we are in, and we can walk through the wizard to set up our very own manet network. This is where the help guide ends, so I will show you how I set up my network, just in case you wanted to copy what I'm doing or even just get familiar with how the whole process works. Remember, we're setting up a network of radios. If you just do one radio, it's not going to connect to anybody else, right? You're trying to build your own fleet of manet radios. The key with openmanet is that everything must match, with exceptions which I will mention. If you put text in a box somewhere, or if you choose a setting option, you must copy this on all the other nodes for the most part. If even one setting is different, the mesh will not form reliably and the nodes won't connect. There are again exceptions, I will talk about those as we go through it. So, let's walk through how I have things set up. The very first menu you will be brought to is setting up the admin panel for the Heltec device itself so that you can access it. Remember, when we logged in, we used the default username of root and the default password of Open Manet. We need to change this now before we go any further. The username of root will stay the same, but we need to change the password to something that we will remember. Guys, this is absolutely critical here. If you forget this password, you will not be able to get back into this device. It's going to be an absolute nightmare, so make sure that you do not forget any of these passwords or really any of the data that we're putting in today. Either way, put that password in and double-check it, and we also need to give this node a name. So, put whatever name you like in this box to help you identify this node later on. This name is not super crucial. It's okay, you can put whatever you want to here. I usually just put something like Manet 1 2 3 or 4, depending on which node I'm working on. Doesn't really matter. Once we've put in our host name and chosen a good password and confirmed that password, we can click apply and wait just a second for these changes to take effect on the device. You don't have to do anything next. The next page should load to allow you to continue through the wizard. Clicking the 802.11s mesh wizard, we are brought to the first choice. We can set this up as either a mesh point or a mesh gate. For right now, I'm going to choose mesh point, but later on, I will want at least one of these nodes to be a mesh gate so that I can access this over the internet at some point. This is a whole rabbit hole, and this is going to be something that I'm going to do with my Raspberry Pi version. For right now, these small little Heltec devices, I'm just going to keep these as mesh points. Clicking next, this brings us to the most important menu of the entire process. Everything on this page must match all of the other nodes you add on this network. I would recommend very strongly writing down all of these options, whatever you put into these boxes, just so that you don't forget them when adding other nodes. The mesh ID is the name of your network. You can choose anything you want, it doesn't matter, as long as it matches with every other node. Same with the passphrase. This is the password that will be needed to connect to this mesh network. This is not the same password as what you use for the admin portal. I mean, you could use the same one if you wanted to, but considering I'm going to be giving this password out to people who are going to be connecting to my network, I want this password to be different than what I used earlier. You also need to choose an operating frequency and a channel, which will be automatically chosen when you choose the bandwidth. So, you can really only just choose one or the other. For my purposes today, I will choose the absolute maximum of 8 MHz to get as much data as possible for reasons that will become clear later on. If you plan on just using this for connecting up a bunch of ATAC devices, you can most certainly just use the lowest option. You don't actually need all 8 MHz of bandwidth, and you will probably have better range the lower bandwidth you're using. But today, for this example, we're going to be more aggressive in the options because we really want to show what this platform can do. So, 8 MHz it is for now. You can always change this later on, of course, but you have to make sure that every radio on the network is using the same bandwidth and the same channel. Clicking next, we can leave this menu as it is. This just tells you how the traffic is going to be routed over the network. On mine, I can't actually see the button selected, but you can see its default is bridge mode. So, we can just leave this as it is and click past it. Next up, we have the SSID for the Wi-Fi access point itself. This will be the Wi-Fi point that you will connect to on your phone. So, that link between your smartphone and this Heltec node, this is the SSID that we're configuring right now on this menu. I prefer to name me something innocuous because this Wi-Fi name will be broadcast to anyone within range. I prefer to use something that sounds generally like telecoms, like Verizon or T-Mobile or AT&T or whatever. Same story with the Wi-Fi password, choose something that you can remember. On this page though, this is one of those exceptions where you do not want to have every node using the same thing because you don't want your phone getting closer to another node and then trying to connect to that. It's essentially like having five or six different Wi-Fi routers all in your living room all having the same SSID and password. Your phone's just going to bounce between them all and just you're going to have a nightmare. So, this is that menu where you're going going to change something. So, in the case of my devices, what I normally do is I get a label maker and I will put the SSID and the password for each device on the actual device using a label maker so that I don't get anything mixed up. For troubleshooting later on, this will make things much, much easier if you have problems. So, this is the menu where you want to choose a different Wi-Fi name and a different Wi-Fi password. I mean, you could use the same password, but make sure it's a different name for every device you set up. Once we make our selections, we click next and we are almost done. As per the warning on your screen, once you click apply, you will need to reconnect as you are changing the Wi-Fi name, which is going to change the IP address. So, once you click apply, you will need to wait for the device to reboot, which will again take a few minutes. Eventually, the Wi-Fi name you just changed will show up to connect to and you can connect using the password you created. Now, we use again the little trick of hitting the information button to get the IP address once again so that we can log back into the portal and check to see if it's working. Welcome to the world of IT. Logging back into admin portals can sometimes instantly after everything reboots several times. Once we're into the home page though, we can see our mobile ad hoc network. If we have only set up one device so far, we won't see anything special here for the moment, but we can go to the quick config menu to double-check our setup. We want to make sure that we have documented four things. We want to scroll down to the Morse Micro Radio One setting and double-check the country we're in, the frequency and the channel, and also the SSID or mesh ID and the password. It sounds redundant to check this. I know, but if you have a typo or an uppercase letter instead of a lowercase letter in any one of these boxes, your mesh will not work. So, it must be exact. Upon verifying this, we can close everything out or you can leave it running, it's your choice, and we're going to run through this entire process again with another Halo node. You will need a minimum of two devices to make sure that everything works. After you have walked through this entire process again using the second device and you have both devices all set up fully, you can take your phone or your computer and connect to one of them and use your computer to connect to the other. If you have a second phone or a tablet, that's also fine, but you need two separate devices to test this to see if it works. From one of the nodes, it doesn't matter which, go to the IP address for that admin panel, log in once again, and you're going to be brought right to the home page once again. This should be starting to get familiar by now. If you did everything correct and you have two nodes all set up and working together, right up front you should see the number one in the m A sh point Halo box. This menu does not count the node we are connected to. It only lists additional nodes that our node can see. If you have two nodes connected, you should see the number one. If you have three nodes connected, you should see the number two, and so on. We can actually see this visually by clicking the number within the topology box, which shows us the other nodes that our Halo radio is connected to. If you do not have any other nodes connected, double, triple, and quadruple check that you don't have any typos in anything you've worked on so far. If you see your other nodes connected, you are done. Congratulations, you have your very own mobile ad hoc network. Okay, so what do we do with it? What we now have is essentially a really long range LAN party. Any app or software package that can run over your Wi-Fi router can run over this to all of the radios that are connected, and it's going to do it automatically. If you have A-Tac installed on your phone that is connected to the MANET, you literally just open up the app and you can see the other phones because A-Tac is automatically pulling in the data just like everyone is connected to the same Wi-Fi access point because that's exactly what's happening. No plugins or servers are necessary. It works right out of the box. How cool is that? You don't need a plugin and you don't need to fiddle with any frequencies or radio settings. Just connect to the Halo nodes access point and everyone's on the same page. But there is another tool that we can use to show off the power of this ecosystem. We can actually stream video over this network, pretty high quality video, too. To set this up as a proof of concept, I'm going to show this using my phone and my tablet just as an example because it's easily man portable. It's a little bit hard for me to lug my PC out in the woods and having everything on the Android ecosystem for this test is a little bit more easy to understand. We're going to need to download two Android apps. One of them is called IP Webcam and the other is called Stream Show. Downloading these apps to both of our devices, we can reconnect to the Manet on both devices and go to the phone that we want to stream from and open up the IP Webcam app. It's a very simple freeware app and you might want to lower the resolution to something a little lower than the maximum your phone camera can handle. Remember, we're transmitting this live video feed over a very bandwidth restricted radio. So, we want to save as much bandwidth as possible. For me, I have found that a 720 by 480 video is great with the quality set at 50% or so. After setting your video quality, tap the three-dot settings menu at the top right of the screen and tap start server. Your phone will now start streaming this video to the IP address listed on your screen. This is a local IP address that is running over your Manet network. Now, on the other phone or tablet in my case, open up the Stream Show app and tap add feed. You can give it a name, whatever you want. Usually, I try to put whatever device I'm connecting to and in the high quality URL box, type in that URL that was given to you by the IP Webcam app. You may also need to put a forward slash in the word video at the end of the URL to fully connect to the raw feed. Now that we have the IP address put in, back out to the main menu and tap the feed you just created and there we have it, a live video feed that is being transmitted over our Halo Manet. The cool part is that, at least in my own testing, this has been surprisingly effective. I personally did not expect this to work, honestly, at all, but it actually works quite well. I am able to mount this phone on my plate carrier facing forward, streaming the video over my network while simultaneously running both Mesh Chat X and ATAC. To me, that's just completely mind-blowing. Good luck doing that with meshtastic mesh core or even packet radio. You cannot do this with these platforms. This is the only way I have found to have a video streaming application running over the radio over a decently long distance at all. As this is set up right now, I have been testing this exact setup as a lightweight and portable surveillance camera. I can mount this phone and the Halo node to a tripod with a battery bank and have a long-range video streaming security camera that works without internet or any other infrastructure. Just as a proof of concept to show what this can actually be used for practically out in the field. Let's say I've got these two trees here and I've got a a wildlife trail coming right through the middle here and I want to live stream some deer or something like that or whatever else you might want to keep an eye on in the outdoors. Well, what I can do is get up here on this little hill and I can set up my phone running the IP webcam app on a little bit of a tripod here. That's all this is. It's just a phone mounted to a tripod, selfie stick, whatever you want to use. From there, that phone down there is connected to this Halo node right here. So, that's all that's going on here. It's very simple. So, essentially, these Halo nodes are acting as little miniature Wi-Fi hotspots and because of that, you're able to connect to them wirelessly, right? So, again, the node does not have to be located next to the camera. Down there on the ground, I'm going to get probably pretty poor reception, but up here in the tree, I get a lot farther range. So, I can take advantage of that wireless ability to separate out the actual Halo node from the camera itself. So, so that's basically it. This little device is acting as a miniature Wi-Fi hotspot that my phone is connected to down there on the ground. From there, it's translating that regular 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi into the Halo standard which is going out over this antenna. So, where is this little antenna going? Well, in this case, it's not going very far because I have my backpack set up right here and again, I have another Halo node. So, this is again the same device. I'll run the same stuff. I just got it in a little pouch here with a battery pack. But, you see here, this is really how it works. I can have the Streamlabs app running on my tablet here, and I can have multiple feeds. I have not tested to see how many different streaming cameras I can have running on this system. I don't know. Running video is pretty hard to do over even over a network as impressive as this, but you get the kind of idea here of how this works. Now, again, I can take this node, I can put it on my back, I can put it strap it to like a a plate carrier's uh back panel, or I can put it inside my ruck and just have the antenna routed out. Really, the the options are up to you. Um so, it's your choice as to what you want to do. And then, just have this tablet or another phone mounted on your chest or in your chest pack or something like that. So, now again, range testing, what are we going to get with this? Well, I don't actually know. I've kind of expended my range out here. Um so, several hundred yards is the most I've uh been able to test it so far. Um more to come on that later, but again, this is still pretty cool, even if the range is pretty short. Theoretically, I would imagine the range is probably close to Meshtastic, probably a little bit worse than Meshtastic is my is my guess. Uh simply because the bandwidth that we're taking up here is not as thin of a signal. Um but, yeah, that's kind of how this is going to work. Um you can set this up in any number of ways. It's very creative, it's very simple. Again, this is just like creating one gigantic LAN party between all these devices, creating your own wireless network off-grid, and as long of a range as possible, and with the ability for this to be a mesh network, which is extremely important. Of course, this is just how I'm testing this right now, but I really like how slick this is. I have found that this is actually quite helpful for having an extra set of eyes in a very sleek and easy-to-use way. If I go into a building and I need to make sure nobody is following me, I can pop this tripod out, and we've got a portable Halo security camera setup that my entire team can see if need be. This also makes for a really solid pole camera, too. I can leave my Halo node strapped into my kit, and I can unsnap my smartphone and affix it to a telescopic pole. And since the phone can stay connected to the Halo Wi-Fi node that's actually still on my kit, I can put this phone on the pole, start the IP webcam app, and now I've got a modern periscope. I would need another phone or my tablet to actually view the feed myself since my phone would now be at the end of a pole, but the benefit is that the entire team can now see my pole camera, which is incredibly helpful. Hopefully, these very limited examples can show the utility of investing and learning about Open Mesh and getting involved with the project. There are many, many other things we can do with this ecosystem. I just wanted to start with streaming video because that is one of the most bandwidth-intensive tasks that the system might have to do. And if it can handle an HD video stream, it can handle pretty much everything you can throw at it. I treat these Heltec devices as more like lightweight training devices, at least for now. I can have this in my bag or in my kit at all times, and if something happens or if I have a need for it, I can plug it into a power bank and connect to its Wi-Fi point, and we're off to the races. So, the system clearly has potential, but it's not the best thing since sliced bread. There are some downsides to this project, which are very hard to get around because we are limited by the hardware itself. So, let me cover some of the disadvantages so that we don't get all spun up and think that this is the end-all, be-all for radio communications and it's going to replace every single thing that we have. That's not true because of these disadvantages. The first disadvantage you might not think about is that when you're using the system, your smartphone thinks it's connected to the internet. What does this mean? Well, it means that your network or device can get bogged down simply because your phone thinks it's connected to the internet, and your apps are just chugging along in the background, tying up an already very restricted connection. I have not noticed this personally. I've not gone into analyze the traffic that is going over the network that specifically just yet. I will later on, but theoretically, this could be an issue depending on how many devices you have. One of the biggest disadvantages is battery life. Unlike Meshtastic devices, these Halo nodes do not come with internal batteries. This should be a clue as to how much power they actually require. So, if you just happen to be, oh, I don't know, a comms guy who gets out of the military to become the comms guy for your group and you thought that you would never have to carry around 50 lbs of batteries ever again, I've got some bad news for you. Running these nodes requires carrying a lot of batteries. Now, it's actually not that bad. In my testing I have been using these Elecom Nest Out power banks. Uh, these 15,000 mA hour versions can last me about 1 day for just the Halo node itself. The node can be run without a phone being connected if you just needed to stash this somewhere to serve as like a repeater node or something. But, if you want to stream video using your phone over the manet, it's going to drain a lot of battery. So, you're going to have to bring either a separate battery pack for your phone or a larger battery pack for all of these devices. Another disadvantage that I mentioned already is that these Heltec devices are quite underpowered. These devices are really just a transportation node. There's not a whole lot of computing going on on these devices. They don't have a whole lot of memory. You can't install programs on them. And for most people in most cases, it would probably be vastly better, at least more ideal for sure, to build a full-blown Raspberry Pi setup because there are a couple of capabilities you might need later on. I was reading through the documentation for these Heltec devices and I'm also not sure as to if these devices will actually form a proper mesh and actually hop traffic between devices. I think it will, but it's a little fuzzy for me right now. So, this is something I need to research further and actually test out in the field because I suspect that these devices would be best served with a centralized hub somewhere in the network. Again, for right now, this is all just kind of developmental and I wanted to get set up in a purely plug-and-play arrangement without having to source any tiny parts and antennas and circuit boards. I just wanted one thing to buy that works just for testing to see what is possible with a commercial off-the-shelf device that is also small enough to be carried everywhere. Another disadvantage is scalability. These Heltec devices specifically were only designed for small networks. Again, these are really just bridge devices. So, I don't actually know what the theoretical limit really is for these specific devices. Obviously, the more nodes you add to the network, the slower it's going to be, but it's going to require a lot more testing to determine what the limits of this technology really are. Another disadvantage, which is probably going to affect most people, is 900 MHz has problems in cities. As many people have discovered via the rise of Meshtastic and Mesh Core, the 900 MHz radio band is pretty congested in many major cities, especially with many smart cities coming into play. Car key fobs, weather sensors, driveway alarms, doorbells, wireless telephones, some traffic signals I think. All of these devices are operating in the same general part of the spectrum. This presents a problem where the noise floor might be too high for this to work reliably in heavily populated areas. It's sort of like trying to hold a conversation in a room with 200 noisy people, and since everybody is having their conversations all at once, it's hard for two people to actually hear each other. This is why the main problem with this is range. As with all radio communications, range is never as good as you want it to be. In this case, we are talking the potential range is much shorter than you will probably want. Because this radio is transmitting in the 900 MHz range, but the bandwidth is potentially comparatively wide depending on the data we are sending over the network, this could get complicated really quickly. Again, this is a work in progress for me, and I'm trying to use a video stream as a way of having some sort of benchmark for reliability and range because streaming video is extremely intensive and takes up a lot of bandwidth. And if you start getting into a situation where you're jammed, the video feed cuts out sooner than anything else. So, it's a the of the worst-case scenario range-wise, if that makes sense. Sending A Tac messages or using Reticulum, both of which use smaller data packets, and you can actually shrink that bandwidth down to that that 1 MHz option in the in the menus, you're going to get a lot longer range. I cannot give you a specific range of this system, but generally speaking, this is going to be used by a small team in a local area. This is not like the Ghost Net or any kind of other HF radio option. You're not talking across the country with this. You will be lucky to get a single mile line of sight with this radio setup. At least that's what the literature on Halo seems to indicate. However, do not take single mile range as gospel because I've had mixed results, and I I need to do more range testing to see what this can really stretch out to do. In my own testing, I am seeing a range of about what I get with MeshTastic, uh but that's also a very loaded statement because MeshTastic is decently common in my state, and I don't live near any major cities, so my testing results are probably quite skewed, at least when it comes to most of you out there trying to duplicate what I'm doing. But generally speaking, when it comes to range, we're not going to be going that far with this. The trade-off is that we can push a lot more data over the network as opposed to using something like MeshTastic or Mesh Core. If we can get the same or similar range as MeshTastic or Mesh Core, but we're able to stream HD video to each other while also running A Tac, while also running Reticulum, well, that's a lot more capability for about the same price, about the same range, and we're getting a lot more capability for it. Now, finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the emissions control concerns of using technology like this. EmCon is, of course, a concern for some people. It's probably more of a concern for more people than it should be, but due to the nature of these devices, there are emissions control concerns or EmCon concerns if you are operating in an environment where a nation-state level adversary might be hunting you. I'm not going to go into depth here because this is very much situation-dependent, and you will have to decide what risk to assume if you are of the mindset that anything more complicated than a Baofeng will get you killed while you're hiking through the woods, then maybe this tool isn't for you. But, if you understand risk management and risk mitigation and know that there is a time and place for every tool, this is not going to really be a concern. As for Open Manet, you are bringing two different Wi-Fi routers with you. One standard 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi node and the Halo Wi-Fi node two all in the same device. If you wanted to mitigate that 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi node, you can plug your phone into the device using an ethernet to USB-C adapter cable and then turning off the Wi-Fi node itself. You can do this from the admin portal if you are more of an advanced user. I would not recommend this for beginners, but I just wanted to mention that because there are ways to mitigate at least one of those signals so that you're only going to be using the Halo radio to to communicate. But, once again, this will depend on what you and your team deems as acceptable. I know that this has been a complete firehose of information today and this is still a very developmental technology. So, right now this is not something that many people will trust with their life or rely upon as their only communications method. The arrangement that we have covered here today is what I have been using as a test bed for a lot of other stuff. So, it might not be the best fit for every use case. If you are interested in learning more about the nuts and bolts of how Open Manet works, I would strongly recommend just reading through the documentation on the Open Manet website. That is a really good information source. And if you would prefer more of a video format, I certainly recommend checking out the YouTube channel Builds by Shane who released a really in-depth video on how to get this set up with a more capable Raspberry Pi arrangement. Once again, this tech is still very much in active development. There's not a whole lot of content out there on it right now. We just know that it exists and parenthetically what it can be used for. And to the best of my knowledge, the Heltec node method I've covered here today is the closest thing we have right now to a turnkey solution on the market. But, that's okay. We can consider this a work in progress and we can and flesh out what the system can do while other people start getting involved with the Open Manet project. As we are finding out right now in both Ukraine and in the Middle East, it turns out that developmental technology is often not just used in warfare, but also refined and improved upon based on that combat data. Most weapons we have today are the result of being developed in warfare. Far too often, history has romanticized an experimental rifle that was extremely rare at the time, but still used in combat like once. But when we have that same mentality toward communication, many people shirk away from trying to put developmental radios to the test. As for the Open Manet project, I plan to continue testing out my nodes, and the next phase for me is to build a proper Raspberry Pi node, which will allow me to do a lot more. These Heltec devices are pretty cool, and they are a simple and cheap way to get introduced to the world of Open Manet, but we've got bigger goals on the horizon, and we're going to need a lot more computing power. So, more to come on this later on. Right now, this is just introducing the concept so that we can be more familiar with what the options are that are out there, and we can get a better idea of what capabilities the serious citizen is going to need moving forward. Now that we have an understanding, we can start building goals towards our communications future, and how these tools can help the prepared citizen to fight in the shade.