June 3rd to June 9th, 2024 – Meshtastic SDR, DragonTooth, and Artemis

Josh Conway, aka “crankylinuxuser”, aims to implement a full transceiver stack for a software defined radio (SDR) to enable it to act as a node on a Meshtastic radio network. Currently, the transmit functionality is still in development, but you can experiment with his receive capabilities by cloning his GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/meshtastic_sdr. Meshtastic uses LoRa at the physical layer, but it is important to note that Meshtastic’s network layer is not LoRaWAN. LoRaWAN is a specification maintained by the LoRa alliance. Meshtastic does not comply with this specification, you can read more about why its developers chose to diverge from the LoRaWAN standard and other facts about the frequencies, bandwidth, and power available on Meshtastic Networks here: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/. Lastly, Conway’s solution to implementing a full transceiver stack for Meshtastic on a SDR is not as trivial as connecting up a GNU Radio Source block to gr-lora_sdr: https://github.com/tapparelj/gr-lora_sdr. gr-lora_sdr is a dependency of the transceiver stack, but crankylinuxuser’s implementation builds a network decoder on the physical layer transceiver provided by gr-lora_sdr.

 

Meshtastic_SDR can run on any SDR that is supported by the Soapy driver, which means if you have a HackRF, BladeRF, SDRPlay, PlutoSDR, Airspy, or RTLSDR you can try out this project. The benefit of implementing this transceiver on a SDR rather than a microcontroller connected to a LoRa chip, like the SX1262, is that you can look at multiple channels simultaneously. This includes each of the seven presets! Contrast this with a Meshtastic-specific device that is configured to operate on one channel at a time. This means, with enough processing power, you can:

As a final note, if you decide to run Meshtastic_SDR on DragonOS, be careful not to install the most recent version of protobuf with Python when testing out Meshtastic_SDR. Other applications, like Kismet, depend on older version of the protobuf that is already installed on DragonOS. Therefore to run this you should be within a virtual environment. Watch Cemaxecuter walk trhough this process in his recent video:

 

 

If you want to try out Artemis on DragonOS, let us know whether or not it ends up working for you. Here are the steps that should allow you to run v4.0.3:

~$ git clone https://github.com/Aresvalley/Artemis.git
~$ cd Artemis
~/Artemis$ git checkout v4.0.3
~/Artemis$ sudo apt-get install libxcb-cursor0
~/Artemis$ python3 -m venv .venv
~/Artemis$ source .venv/bin/activate
(venv) ~/Artemis$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt
(venv) ~/Artemis$ python3 app.py