LoRA is sort of a slower version of wifi and as such, you should assume Meshtastic is monitored, at least for traffic metadata. The actual messages are encrypted though.
LoRa is great in that it gives us direct control and ownership over the infrastructure. One can participate in the network without their identity being known. But, yes, traffic metadata specifying the sender and recipient identifiers are plain text and can be easily logged.
Default configurations will have your device broadcasting often to contact new neighbors and will re-broadcast incoming messages. Since the device is quite active, and the chirped signal signal so characteristic when seeing via an SDR, someone who is actively tracking a Meshtastic device can do so very effectively.
Still, the fact that you own fully the device and have total control over it opens up a lot of possibilities. To give one example: if the mesh around here were strong, I could make use of a device configured for Rx only as a meshtastic pager. I might set up my Raspberry pi to inject a message from a randomized sender via MQTT in response to an XMPP message. Then, I would not use any radio transmitter at all.
For regular peer-to-peer chatting, yes, the default properties are very leaky, but we can change some of what we don’t like.
There is actually still such a thing as a satellite pager, a receive-only device that can get pages that cover regions as big as small countries. They stopped making the receivers quite a while back, but some are still around and the subscriptions are still available, though expensive. This info is itself some years old so maybe they are all gone by now.
That is very interesting. When I looked into satellite devices I only found two way devices, like the GARMIN inReach. I figured that it made sense that satellite comms would be 2-way because broadcasting all over the world seems rather extreme.
I have searched for these now and found the Iridium 9501 from Motorola. It is pricey, ~$680 for the device and either $90 (150 messages) or $150 (unlimited) per month for the subscription. In the description it says that you do need to program three ‘Message Delivery Areas’ as the messages are not broadcast globally, but I think this is acceptable.
Thanks for pointing that out. $90/month is pricey… But it is cool enough that I would seriously consider it if I would travel a lot for work.
POCSAG pagers still exist in the US too, though again, they are quite expensive compared to cell phones. Their main attraction is supposed to be higher reliability, so e.g. doctors can get paged even with the mobile phone network is out. I don’t know if that advantage still exists. In the more distant past there was something called ARDIS which I think is gone now. That was quite a robust signal, so you could get paged even in sub-basements of buildings and places where mobile phones didn’t work. Repair technicians who worked in those places often carried them.
I think that the advantage might still exist, especially in buildings with thick walls and underground floors. While looking into pagers I found discussions about them being phased out in many hospitals and replaced with ‘EPIC secure chat’ and with sharing private cellphone numbers.
In the Netherlands there is also the P2000 system, which is considered to be very reliable. That network makes use of FLEX to send messages to emergency services. It is possible to easily capture those too using SDR, or to see a live dump of these messages in sites like this one: https://p2000-online.net/alleregiosf.html
I’ve followed this stuff slightly as it’s interesting for the reasons you say, but I’d have to say it’s not really cost effective for most of us. POCSAG in particular only works in relatively localized areas like single countries. I know a guy who would want something like it, but only if it worked pretty much everywhere, since he travels a lot.
Yea, I can see that. So, that guy might like the satellite pager, but probably will not like the price tag.
Thanks for your reply!
Yeah, as others mentioned, you can get cheaper data plans depending on the monthly data you need.
However, one of the interesting properties is that, unlike with phones, there is no restriction on the number of pagers that can listen to your assigned RIC. You can use one subscription to communicate with as many pagers as you would like, and each individual pager can be programmed using text filters such that one can implement their own sub-address system.