February 12, 2025

This Week in Amateur Radio

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via HACKADAY: Decoding Meshtastic with GNU Radio

Meshtastic is a way to build mesh networks using LoRa that is independent of cell towers, hot spots or traditional repeaters. It stands to reason that with an SDR and GNU Radio, you could send and receive Meshtastic messages. That’s exactly what [Josh Conway] built, and you can see a video about the project, Meshtastic_SDR, below. The video is from [cemaxecuter], who puts the library through its paces.

For hardware, the video uses a Canary I as well as the WarDragon software-defined radio kit which is an Airspy R2 and a mini PC running Dragon OS — a Linux distribution aimed at SDR work —  in a rugged case. GNU Radio, of course, uses flows which are really just Python modules strung together with a GUI.

The GNU blocks send and receive data via TCP port, so using the radio as a data connection is simple enough. The flow graph itself for the receiver looks daunting, but we have a feeling you won’t change the default very much.