Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868 MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down the road. While I understand that height is key (and my antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates very rapidly.
So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the practical execution falls short. I think established methods like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior, especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio incredibly affordable (around €20)
I have been meaning to try it out
Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.
If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.
The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.
In some places. If you're dumping excess energy onto their network, in some regions they'll also charge you for that
Australia has the highest density of residential rooftop solar in the world, making up about 11% of the grid supply. Feed-in tariffs are standard there.
Anecdotally, amongst my social circle, people are buying house batteries because the feedin tariffs are so low it's worthwhile spending $10k or so to store your daytime solar for use in evenings/night - because it costs 40 or 60c per kWHr to buy electricity off the grid in the evening, and they only give you a cent or two to if you feed it on during midday solar peaks. It's way better value to charge your house battery (and you car if you can) than to sell solar generated electricity back to the grid.
The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.
The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.
The grid going down is game over. Once you’re at this point, there are already people going hurt. The way inverters react to this is irrelevant.
The thing making home setups not a source energy utilities would want to pay much for is that they bring no service to the grid (frequency and voltage management, ability to be turned off when the grid manager wants, reactive production management).
The part where people get hurt is that in overproduction events, the grid manager has no way to cut that production or even single homes, so they sometimes have to cut whole neighborhoods. That did happen already, even if it’s not a common thing.
Interestingly DECT NR+ is a 5G standard on dedicated spectrum and has been designed to be a mesh from the start.
My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding noise, and so local messaging out to 80km or so tends to be pretty reliable. The same would be absolutely impossible with wifi.
That’s with 80 or so local nodes on LONG_FAST, population of around half a million.
Thats said, Meshtastic’s routing algorithm is extremely inefficient and has huge room for improvement.
What does this mean exactly and how does it address GP's concerns?
https://web.archive.org/web/20111119205258/http://fabfi.fabf...
I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat project.
https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
I've given more study to the latter, and I think it's the lack of store and forward reliable transmission. The messages goes out once and if it doesn't make it.. too bad so sad. The whole ecosystem strongly assuming you have internet access is also a real bummer.
If anyone is looking to improve it or develop a better alternative, I did help create a primitive you should consider using: https://github.com/sipa/minisketch