Follow up to this post: https://startrek.website/post/37629244
I put together the RTL-SDR + Meshtastic EAS-SANE Alerter system a few weeks ago and have had it running on my bench. So far, I’d only gotten the weekly test alerts to my private channel, but yesterday it was absolutely blowing up (see post screenshot - those are real alerts from yesterday). I’ve redacted the identifying bits, but the locations that are blacked out are relevant to the reception area.
The real emergency alerts currently go to my private channel along with the test ones, but I was thinking about changing that to send the real alerts to the default public channel. There’s not a lot of mesh activity in my area, so I can’t really poll the crowd for opinions on that, so I figure I’d ask here to get some general feedback/consensus. One thing I noticed yesterday was that the tornado warning came through this about 45 seconds before all 3 cell phones in my house started blaring with the same alert.
Bonus – Here’s the PiZero running the show. Forgive the messy workbench (I tried to crop most of the chaos out of view).
It’s got the USB hub hat with two RTL-SDRs connected (one for NOAA reception and the other tuned to a local variety station). The signal from NOAA is decoded and tee’d to the Meshtastic EAS alerter as well as to nc which is then picked up from my Snapcast server to distribute on the network to anyone who wants to listen to it. The second SDR, currently tuned to the variety station, is simply piped to the Snapcast server. I may do something else with that later, who knows? Both are fed through a splitter from an amplified FM/VHF/UHF antenna.
Yeah I’d definitely not be sending this on the default channel, but I would coordinate with the mesh to open a dedicated EAS/emergency comms channel
Yes, that would annoy me. Our local mesh has eas specific channels.
If the frequency of posting was low enough it might not be a problem, but it would be much better to get a dedicated channel set up for emergency notifications and related traffic.
I’d probably set up a separate channel and publish there. Let others know it exists and they can add it to their setup if they want. It’d still be affecting airtime but not spraying the default public channel.
Cool project, maybe find a mesh group in your rough region and ask them? I think some people will probably have strong opinions about the potential for spam with it being automated. Someone with less noble intentions could really mess stuff up with this concept.
There is no local or even regional mesh group. I see a lot of nodes when I’m out and about but there’s nothing coordinated. I’ve thought about starting one but don’t have time time to invest right now. From my house, I see the occasional node but none that are always visible.
But yeah, I’d like to get a local mesh group going and publish channel configs for different things, emergency alerts being one they can “subscribe” to or not.
