The Open Source Internet Is Here

[00:00:00] Your phone is great at keeping you connected as long as you keep paying the bill. But soon you might be able to stay connected across continents and do it all over a network you actually own. Something the legacy telecom model still can't give you. This radio doesn't need a cell tower and you don't need to pay a monthly subscription for the right to use it. You can modify it, upcycle the hardware, and extend what it can do. [music] It transmits on a frequency about 100 times lower than traditional Wi-Fi. The same kind of radio people use [00:00:30] to carry their [music] voices across oceans. But instead of talking into an analog microphone, I'm bridging it into Reticulum, a fully digital, permissionless, open-source network. I want to find out if we can connect communities hundreds or even thousands of miles apart over the air for free [music] and help build an internet that belongs to the people using it. The problem is today our communication passes through [music] gatekeepers. They decide what we're allowed to do, keep a record of us doing it, and then charge us for the privilege. I want to build a network where nobody has that kind of [00:01:00] power over the people using it. Which might sound like wishful thinking, [music] but incredibly cheap, low power technology, open- source code, and communityrun networks are already functioning today. Projects like Meshtastic and Meshcore have proven out that model and continue to gain adoption. In fact, a few weeks ago, I was driving north to see some family from Central Florida all the way to New Hampshire. And for fun, I stuck a magnetic 915 megahertz whip antenna on the back of my car with a small Neo1 [00:01:31] listening on the public Longfast channel. And over the course of the trip, the radio picked up messages and connected us with people along the route. Some cities like conquered New Hampshire were absolutely teeming with activity. And by the end of the trip, we had seen more than 450 nodes on just that one protocol. That's what this looks like when enough people get curious, put up a radio, and invite somebody else to try it. You start with something you want to understand, share it with a few friends, and little by little, a community builds around it. But what happens when the people you [00:02:01] want to reach are hundreds of miles away? That's the gap I've been trying to bridge for over a year now. Because right now, if you want long range communication, you basically have three options. You can use cell towers, but you need a large number of them, and they're really only economically viable for big telos and ISPs. You can use a satellite service like Starlink, Garmin, or Aridium. These are good for off-grid situations. And in my last video, I showed how you could hook an Aridium modem into Reticulum and send a text [00:02:32] message from anywhere with a clear view of the sky. But the satellites were proprietary. You need to broker a monthly plan, and each message still incurred a toll. Or you can build a community network with something like Meshtastic. And that model is real, local, and actually belongs to the people using it. But covering serious distance requires a lot of nodes and enough people between here and wherever you're trying to reach. But is there another option? I think so. And if this works, privatelyowned networks could connect across hundreds or even [00:03:03] thousands of miles without traditional internet back haul. But for that to have even the slightest chance of being possible, I need two miracles. Miracle number one is I need to somehow cross this on a path we own. And miracle number two, I need to do it legally. Now, the physics behind this isn't new, and neither is sending data over radio. What is new is reticulum and who can build with it. Radios that once cost thousands are suddenly becoming affordable. Open source networking [00:03:33] software can stitch completely different links into one single network. And AI lets one reasonably stubborn person work through problems that once required an entire engineering team. For the first time, something like this doesn't feel completely insane. But that doesn't mean it's a great idea. After all, maybe there's a reason nobody has done this before. But really, there's only one way to find out. And fortunately for you, circumventing corporate and government overreach is one of my favorite hobbies. So, I'm going to try it. one real reticulum message, hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. No cell tower, [00:04:05] private satellite or corporate network in the middle. And the technology that makes that possible is one a lot of people have already written off. This is ham radio. And depending on who you ask, ham radio is either one of the last longrange communication systems ordinary people can actually own or an elaborate way for retired men to discuss the weather. But these radios can do something your Wi-Fi router can't. They can potentially cross this, but they can carry digital data, too. Small packets sent directly over the air. Could one of [00:04:35] those packets travel thousands of miles? Potentially. But could we turn that connection into a bridge for a modern open-source network? That's what I'm here to find out. But I wasn't here to chat with random operators. I wanted to take the thing making those conversations possible, the radio link itself, and make software talk through it instead. Because ham radio isn't limited to voice. That noise is data. It's called APRS. Small packets carrying locations, weather reports, status updates, and [00:05:06] short messages. Nearby stations can repeat those packets while internet gateways collect them and plot their reported positions on maps like this. So, sending data over amateur radio isn't new. But APRS was built for a different job. And this particular APRS channel is on VHF. Great for local coverage, but not the long-distance Skywave link that I'm attempting. I could build another oneoff HF messaging system, but then it would connect only radio operators running the same hardware and software. That's why I want to use Reticulum. Reticulum is transport [00:05:37] agnostic. It doesn't care whether data travels over Laura, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, the internet, or a custom HF link to Reticulum. Each one is simply another path through the network. So, this wouldn't create a tiny new network for a handful of HF operators. It could bridge existing reticulum communities together, even if the people inside those communities never touch an HF radio themselves. Someone using Laura in one town could potentially reach someone on an entirely different kind of link [00:06:07] hundreds of miles away with HF quietly carrying the data across the gap. That means I need to design a custom HF packet that carries what our bridge needs. If it works, this radio doesn't become another isolated system. It becomes a long-distance bridge between networks that already exist. Now, I have a bad habit of refusing to ship these projects until they're absolutely perfect. Which is why you sometimes wait months between videos. So, this time I gave myself 3 weeks. When Sunday comes, [00:06:37] testing stops. Whether it works or not, I have to ship what I have. So, I have 3 weeks to build the bridge. To attempt this, I need one more radio, which is saying something because my office is already full of them. I have boards for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Laura, Halo, even an Aridium modem. But those radios either stay relatively local or depend on somebody else's infrastructure to go farther. This is the Airmemes Light 2, and it's the key to this entire puzzle. It's a relatively inexpensive [00:07:07] open-source softwaredefined radio rated to cover frequencies from 0 to 38.4 4 MHz including the part of the spectrum known as HF or high frequency. A traditional HF radio is built primarily around a person with a microphone, but the Airme is built around a computer. It can still carry voice, but I can also have my software generate the exact data frame I need, put it directly on the air, and decode it on the other side. And HF has a trick that none of the [00:07:37] other radios scattered around my office can perform on their own. Under the right conditions, an HF signal can travel into the ionosphere, reflect back toward the Earth, and land hundreds or even thousands of miles beyond the horizon. It's called skywave propagation. There is no chain of community nodes or private satellite carrying the messages. The atmosphere itself becomes part of the path. So, this might be the right radio that lets us cross this map. There was just one minor problem. Mine arrived in three [00:08:08] pieces. Okay, so let's try to put this guy together. So, we have the enclosure, we have the main uh board, and then we have the filter board, which we're also going to [music] need. So, three parts, and that should be all we need to put this guy together. So, let's go ahead and open these up. You slide the board into these uh into these rails here. I kind of like that. [music] Um, so basically this goes on like this. There's nothing holding it together. What's going to hold it together is the [00:08:39] face, the front face plate, which [music] has the four screws in the corners. So this part, um, this is the filter. This is kind of like the sideboard. The [music] tricky part that I've seen is on the main board. And this is our board right here. And this thing is interesting because it's connection is a Ethernet. So it shows up as a network device line. But what I'll do is I'll push the screw out just I should be able to do it like this. There it goes. So that's our first half right there. I [00:09:11] believe all we do is slide it in the rails. So now and [music] then these connect through the head pin here. Doing one of these. I don't think there's a direction. Apply pressure evenly here. The other side of the enclosure actually doesn't slide. It just [music] you can go right on top. Um, and I think we're going [clears throat] to be good to go. Um, no, I think we're good though. This thing [music] is uh is pretty solid. We've got it set up here. Good to go. Was perhaps slightly optimistic because [00:09:42] while the was now capable of transmitting, I still wasn't legally allowed to press that button. Remember, miracle [clears throat] number two, I have to do this all legally. Transmitting data on this part of the amateur radio spectrum requires a license, and I didn't have one yet. But receiving is different. Anyone can listen. So, while I studied for the ham radio technician class license exam, I started learning about the receive side of the radio. And a lot of that studying came from two YouTube channels, Ham Radio Crash Course and Ham Radio 2.0. I [00:10:14] basically had their videos playing in the background while I tinkered with the rig. So, thank you to both of them. The first thing I learned was that the radio itself was only half the problem. To hear anything, I needed the right antenna. The 900 MHz radios I normally use have a wavelength of about 13 in, but at 28 MHz, the wavelength is roughly 35 ft. The antenna doesn't have to be a full wavelength long, but it does scale with it, which is why this thing has a much longer antenna. This is a Falcon [00:10:46] dipole. basically two lengths of wire sized for the band. Ideally, it would be outside high in the air with plenty of open space. You'll notice my installation took a slightly more interpretive approach. Okay, so this thing is a nano VNA and it helps you understand how effective your Intuna setup is. This thing intimidated me for a long time. You can see there's a lot going on here and it's not clear what everything does. So, I'm going to simplify it for you. So what we can do is we can remove some of these traces. [00:11:19] Display trace. We can get rid of this. We can get rid of this and we can get rid of this. What we really care about is the SWR which tells us where the center frequency is for the antenna and how well tuned it is at that frequency. So and we do need to specify a range. But basically what we can do is we can take an antenna like this. So, this is a Muzzy Works 915 megahertz whip antenna. So, what we can do is we can just screw [00:11:49] this on like so. And it's going to start to give us a readout here. We have the end of the range here at 900. So, what we're going to want to do is move this so that we can actually see um what we want. So we'll do start at say 850 MHz and then end stop at 960 MGHertz. Let's see here. Okay, we can start to see the center frequency. And so now if we want to see like exactly where that dip is, we just drag this [00:12:21] over, bring it down to the dip. So you can see you can see it moves a little bit like based on like how you know how we have this thing set up. But we can see it's around 900 MHz, right? Um, one other thing I'll show you is, um, you probably have some triband antennas or dualband antennas. Um, this right here is one of those. Just had to get a special connector for this, but um, when you put in an antenna that is dual band or triband or what have you, you'll get multiple sort of like resonance zones. [00:12:51] If I'm transmitting on 28 MHz, is my antenna actually tuned around 28 MHz and does it have an efficient reading? Yeah, these things aren't that intimidating. You can get better results by calibrating it each time with these three sort of dummy loads right here. You pop it on, go over to uh calibrate, and then you hit calibrate. You have open, short, load, and you just do all three of those and it'll calibrate it. So, pretty easy. Definitely a useful tool in my toolkit to see like how effective an actual antenna is. and it's been interesting. [00:13:21] >> Um, now one of the cool things is you can get that to move based on like moving the arms of the antenna. So like see how the center right now says 26.840. Well, if we see one is clipped over there and one is clipped over there. If I move like let's uncip it real quick. So and I just tossed it down there. And now you can see it's much deeper just by moving it. Right. But the problem is we [00:13:51] want the center frequency to move to 28. That's the problem. Yeah. You can see how like moving the arms affects the shape there. So like now it's more towards 28.160 which is where we're going to transmit. If you zoom out a little bit like you can see it's relatively flat flat flat flat but then when we get to our 28 MHz we're we're dipping down and that's basically what we want. So that's really just the process that I used to get these antennas tuned properly, but it [00:14:22] was connected and somehow it started hearing things. So this is my first day with the Airme and I have Spark SDR going here and I didn't get any voice uh well I did get a little bit of voice but not a whole lot um when I started playing around with it. But I'm listening right now on this band here, um, 21 MHz. Um, the channel that I'm ultimately going to use or the frequency I'm ultimately going to use is 28 MHz, uh, which is what my antenna is tuned [00:14:52] for. But nonetheless, um, when I listen on this frequency uh, and decoding FT8 data packets, I see basically a whole conversation going on here. FT8 is a digital mode built for what's called weak signal communication. It makes the same basic trade-off as Laura, a very low data rate in exchange for working at extremely low signal to noise ratios, sometimes recovering messages from signals you can barely distinguish from the noise. It's basically lightweight [00:15:23] text messaging over HF. And um the first message that I got was actually from Bogotaa, Colombia over HF. And this right here is what a message looks like. It's like a thin line goes out for several seconds and then it gets decoded and then it gets turned into the actual message here. And this is like the call sign the station and it's basically saying like received and then it's giving a a dB like received at -14 dB [00:15:55] and uh you have the time stamp and all that stuff here. So like my first message uh I received from Bogota, Colombia. I'm here in uh central Florida. That's 1600 miles. The air may right here. The antenna setup I have is pretty janky. Let me show it to you. Um so this is the antenna. Um this is called a centerfed uh dipole antenna. It's basically two wires uh that go left and right and you [00:16:26] can do horizontal, vertical, L-shaped, etc. But you can see one of the arms is literally just in my office right here. And then the other arm is dangling off out the window. So, um, definitely not an optimized antenna rig by any means. It should be outside. This is a cement brick house. Say hi, Bruno. This is cement brick house, so not ideal, but like we see like we already see more messages coming through here. like we see um this data being sent and that's [00:16:58] the whole powerful aspect of that like the only reason the message can hit us from Bogotaa it's blocked by the curvature of the earth the only reason it can hit us is because it bounced off the ionosphere and that's kind of like the interesting characteristic of this band um this this band also like makes you is very sort of affected by the solar environment and like flares and nighttime versus daytime and other factors like that. But you can see it's [00:17:28] pretty active right now. Well, that's miracle number one. Once FT8 proved the radio could hear a message from 1600 miles away, I started turning the dial and at 4.84 MHz, I found an AM voice broadcast, most likely WWCR out of Nashville, about 727 miles away. to be lost in the end. This is an insightful parallel to our life here on Earth. >> But they were transmitting at 100,000 [00:17:59] watts, so they were definitely doing most of the work. Either way, receiving clearly worked. Now, I needed to earn the right to transmit. So, now we're going to start messing around with like uh transmitting and what data packet we want to use. We might not use FTA. You can see these messages are very short. That's probably too short for our needs. So, we're going to need something with a little bit more bandwidth. So, I'll start sending coming up with that sort of frame uh shape and then start sending some data and we'll listen with this guy [00:18:30] right here. This is just an RTL SDR. And then we'll work on uh establishing range and stuff. After that, I had heard a message travel 1600 miles, but listening was still the only thing I was legally allowed to do. If I wanted to send our own packet, it was time to take the exam. And by this point, I had been studying for a few weeks now. You can take these tests online, but I guess I wanted the full experience. So instead, I drove down to Miami to Unified Radio [00:19:00] Group, a place they call the farm, where they were having a meetup and doing inerson exams. Okay, so I am at a place here called The Farm. Basically, I'm here to get my ham radio license, or at least take the test. not that nervous because you can literally take these online, but it would be nice to knock this out in one go. So, I can actually use this and this will just allow me to make use of other bands and it'll allow me to use higher transmit powers on the existing bands I've been using, which is like Laura and Halo. So, I can go beyond [00:19:32] the 4 watt total EIRP. There will be some things to consider around on encryption and stuff like that. But for the most part, this will allow me to do a whole lot of other uh neat and interesting experiments as well as potentially create like community nodes that people can make use of that make use of a longer range um uh signal. So hopefully I passed my test. So we'll see. While I waited for the exam to start, one of the guys offered to walk me through a rig he had set up that wasn't too dissimilar from what I ultimately wanted to do. It was called a [00:20:04] VAR gateway. >> HF. The one with the coax coming down here. >> So the one with the coax coming down is for HF. >> Yeah. The one with the box right there. Delta loop. And then that antenna way up there, that's for the VA thing. Starlink. >> Okay. So Starlink. So does Var need internet? >> Yes. >> Oh, because it needs a gateway. >> Yeah, it is the gateway. What we run here is the gateway. >> Okay. >> What we connect to connect from doesn't need internet. >> I see. I see. And that's for FM. VA also works like globally. So it's kind of [00:20:36] dirty in here, but like that's a little VAR station. >> Okay. So So the the data goes over Vara and then it bridges to the internet through Starlink, right? >> Yep. >> What kind of what kind of like like images, voice? >> It's very slow. Like you don't want to send anything over a meg and that's like really pushing. I see. Okay. >> So it'll take a couple minutes. >> I see. Okay. >> You know. Okay. Yeah. >> And it depends on like there's audio levels that you adjust on this mode to make sure that it's not overdriven, >> underdriven, and then of course the signal strength. >> And so can you control that remotely or do you have to be on site or [00:21:07] >> I can I can I have like remote access software to the computer just so I don't have to come here and >> Yeah, exactly. So you can transmit um from wherever technically, right? >> Um yeah, but this isn't going to be transmitting. This is just like listening. It it'll transmit, >> but it's just monitoring one frequency. >> Oh, okay. And then when I connect to it from say my house, yeah, it picks up. It's like, oh, they're calling me because it's attached to a call sign, >> right? >> The the the de modulator side over here de modulates that data. Says, oh, they're looking for me. Let me respond. [00:21:37] I acknowledge your request. Okay, send me the data. Back and forth, back and forth. >> Okay. Okay. >> You know, so and what kind of range can you get on that? >> With this, it's line of sight. So, it really is super dependent upon like >> the station that I'm trying to connect to it to. like I've connected to it. I mean, if I got a badass antenna that's up like on my tower, I could probably get like 50 m, >> you know? >> So, pretty far 50 m. Are there enough other var like nodes to like >> not around here? That's why I set this one up. But there are some as you go [00:22:07] north. >> So, I think Port St. Lucy a little bit north, maybe a little south. There's some there. What you could do is I could dig peep from this one to another one to another one. Okay. >> I think you're limited at two hops. >> Okay. >> So, I can hop from here to there and then we can have communication back and forth. Cool. That's awesome. >> I'll show you the website where it shows all the different nodes. >> Okay, so heading back. Um, just got out of the um meeting. I took the test. I passed. Very happy about that. Um, but I got to say the group was awesome. Um, [00:22:39] you know, there was UHF, VHF. They were running a bunch of tests. Um, they had active gear going, but they had some mesh core nodes. So, some people had some Laura nodes. One of the guys showed me this setup he did where he connected a Starlink to a VHF radio and uses this thing called VAR to be able to send data uh over like analog radio and stuff like that. Um so really cool stuff. Two of the guys had seen my videos. Um so that was really interesting. Uh so yeah, I'm going to go back for sure in the future. I'm going to I grab some contact [00:23:09] information and I'll be able to loop these guys into my projects. I'm located a little bit outside Miami now. So, um it'll actually prove as a cool kind of uh range test to be able to see what we can get between each other. But I'm going to loop them into my projects and just be able to kind of bounce some ideas off them. But great group, really nice turnout and just I think a lot of subject matter expertise among all the participants. So, pleasantly surprised with the turnout there. Happy to get my license. That is a bit of a relief. Hopefully the FCC will uh send me my [00:23:40] call sign in a day or two and I will be able to start uh transmitting and get on the air as they say. So, um and yeah, I'm really going to be focusing on the digital component of this stuff. I'm not going to be doing UHF, VHF so much. I'm going to do be doing things like APRS overdriven Laura overdriven Halo um decrypted and uh maybe some HF bridging with reticulum and just stuff that's really never been done before, but I need to do it the right way. Hence me trying to get my [00:24:10] license today. So anyways, overall really good experience. Definitely would encourage you to get your license if that's an option for you. Oh, and I forgot to mention um something that was really interesting is um so they had this kind of gazebo and uh music playing and stuff, but at one point the power went out, but the VHF radio they were using was uh hooked up to a life P4 battery and they were still transmitting over to Kiscane, which is is pretty far away. The power went out, so it was literally like grid down scenario and uh [00:24:41] they just had they were just talking over the air. Um, so really kind of demonstrates that um, use case for uh, you know, hurricanes and all that sort of thing. So it was just really cool to see that in action. >> So thank you to Unified Radio Group of Miami. And a few days later, I got a very welcome message from the FCC. I now have an official call sign, which feels really good. But it also means that anything I attempt over the air will now be associated with me. So I have to make sure I'm doing things the right way or I could be kicked off the air. We've shown [00:25:12] that the physics are there. It's not easy, but text messages can travel thousands of miles. The second half of this challenge is going to be keeping everything legal, and it's not obvious how we're going to do that. As I mentioned before, we're not interested in analog voice. We want to send data. Audio is a waveform. Data is a package of bits. With the license I have, if we want to use HF for its skywave propagation and send data, it has to happen between 28 and 28.3 MHz. This is [00:25:42] interesting because a lot of my work on ISM band projects like Laura and Wi-Fi Halo have been around 900 MHz, but 28 MHz is far lower and the longer wavelength should improve penetration and refraction in addition to providing atmospheric skipping. So we can use that frequency for our packet transmissions, but we also need to make sure our frames are designed around amateur radio rules. They need to include my call sign. We can do that. The codec has to be public. [00:26:13] We can also do that. But we're forbidden from obscuring the meaning of these communications by any means, which obviously includes encryption. That felt a bit like we were dead in the water because Reticulum doesn't merely use encryption. It's built out of it. Reticulum's creator Mark put it this way. In Reticulum, encryption is gravity. Cryptographic identities tell the network who destinations are. Signed proofs validate paths. And encrypted packets are part of what allows information to move across multiple hops [00:26:44] without trusting the nodes in between. So removing encryption wouldn't give us a less private version of Reticulum. It would break the machinery that makes Reticulum work. And this is where I think most sane people would throw in the towel. But while I was studying, I came across one interesting exception. Amateur radio allows encrypted commands when they're being used to control a satellite. And that makes sense. You don't necessarily want anybody who hears your command link to be able to take control of your spacecraft. So either [00:27:14] every message we send also slightly adjusts the position of a satellite or we find another way. We're going to find another way. And that's when I realized I don't actually need to send the encrypted reticulum packet over HF at all. At least theoretically, you could terminate encryption at the air gateway. Messages could be addressed to that gateway, which would convert them into an amateur radio frame and send them over HF with the destination LXMF address. Anyone who heard the HF message could then bring it back into Reticulum [00:27:44] and forward it to its final destination. This has obvious drawbacks. We're not going to solve spoofing in this video, although cryptographic signatures could still prove mathematically that a message originated from a specific sender. But more importantly, the longhaul HF leg would be transparent and open for anyone to read, which kind of felt like taking two steps backwards. But honestly, maybe that's an acceptable trade-off for now. I mean, Meshtastic has public channels where the private keys are widely known, and those channels still have utility. APRS does [00:28:14] something similar when it sends short audio bursts that get decoded into messages. In fact, amateur radio is fundamentally open communication and people still use it every day. Cuz if you're stranded on a boat or lost in the mountains, do you care if someone can hear your SOS? No, I think it's still useful. So, I fired up cursor, launched an agent, and started drafting the architecture using cross talk as the enduser application. Now, that sentence compresses about 5 days of work. The codec went through multiple versions as [00:28:45] I changed the modulation and symbol rate, added error correction, built benchmark tools, and ran test after test over the air. But now that we're transmitting, we need a way to listen so that we can test. And to do that, we're going to use this device right here. This is an RTL SDR. Mine costs $37. It can't transmit, but it can listen. And for this side of the bridge, that's all we need. Now, it doesn't have a proper antenna yet, but that's okay here in the office because it's so close to the [00:29:15] station that it should still hear our transmissions. We're going to use it to listen for the transmissions coming from the AirMay. And what's awesome about this is that you don't need a license to listen. Theoretically, a user could have a reticulum gateway that listens for our HF traffic and acts as an ingress point, bridging any messages it hears back into the reticulum network. This is similar to how websites like ADSB Exchange work. So, we already know listenon nodes have utility. For testing, I'm going to connect this to one of my prototype [00:29:45] Haven builds, which is really just a Raspberry Pi 5 built for fieldwork like this. We have our initial data package set up, and it's going to look like this. We'll be able to choose the transmit power that we use to send it. But now comes the tricky part. We need to get this working with Reticulum. Now, I'm going to use Cross Talk, which is a mesh chat fork I created so I could build and experiment with it. Reticulum lets you create an interface over anything that can move ones and zeros. But if we create a native interface with the airme, it will move encrypted [00:30:16] reticulum frames directly over HF, which isn't legal here in the United States. So instead, I built a section called bridge extensions, and it lets you create a connector for either the ARMA or the RTL SDR that runs in parallel to reticulum. If the RTL receives a message, the connector reads it, brings it back into Reticulum using the native frames, and forwards it to its destination. If a route is available, transmissions work in the other direction. I can send a message in cross [00:30:46] talk. If I have an HF gateway available, no direct path to my destination, and the message isn't sensitive, I can hand it to the gateway node. That gateway reads the reticulum packet, writes an amateur radio frame, and throws it over HF. If a receiver hears it, that receiver turns the open message back into an LXMF message and forwards it through Reticulum. Now, there's definitely some magic sauce under the hood, but everyday users shouldn't need to deal with that. It should mostly just [00:31:16] work because most people are never going to own an HF radio. They shouldn't have to. If one person on your mesh has the radio and they're licensed to transmit, then the whole mesh has a long hop. It's the same idea as a repeater or a digiper. You don't all carry the tower. You just have to have reach to the person who does. So, we're going to attempt to send a message. Before we can transmit, we do need to publish our codec. So, I'm going to add that to the cross talk um GitHub repo. Just going to be a markdown file here. And you can see [00:31:48] it just gives basically the recipe to decode one of these messages. So, that if someone wanted to if they record these and later want to read them, they can. and I have cross talk and this looks good. So I'm gonna go ahead and generate a comment. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and commit. I'm gonna push to origin and I'm going to pull it up on GitHub cross talk updated just now and then it should be under docs. We're going to go [00:32:19] to HF codec. Okay, so it's literally public now the the decode process here. So that is part of keeping this legal. Okay. So we are going to run our first end to end reticulum test here. So basically we have four different nodes and I'll show you a network diagram. Um it's a little bit of a complex setup. Node number one is just uh this Android phone and it's just running a reticulum client called Columba. And this only has [00:32:50] one interface and that interface is our public TCP internet interface rns1.buildwithparallel.com. So this is a very vanilla reticulum client right here. And this is where we're going to send the message to. So this is going to be the final destination message. Now this guy has a path to this guy which is also running a reticulum client except it's um something we created called cross talk. So this guy is our Raspberry Pi and you [00:33:23] can see its cross talk instance over here and what it has for interfaces is also the public RNS1 internet interface. So that's how um the Pi can talk to Colombia. But what's interesting about the Pi is it also has down here the bridge extension for the RTL SDR and it's set up to ingress any traffic into Reticulum. This runs alongside uh Reticulum. It doesn't run a native [00:33:54] interface because again we want it to run as an extension. Uh if we put native Reticulum frames over HF uh that's going to be illegal. So, so what this guy can do is it can talk to anyone who has a connection to RNS1, but it can also listen for our HF traffic and if it hears anything, it can ingress it into reticulum. Now, so these are one mesh, these two devices here. Now, the second setup is the airmemes which is going to be right over here. Um again another [00:34:27] cross talk instance and what this has for an interface is only one interface which is um a local TCP interface. So that local TCP interface is going to be what it uses to talk to another instance of cross talk which is going to be where I send the message from. So I want cuz what I want to do is have a regular uh reticulum instance talk to another regular reticulum instance where neither of them have any of this HF stuff going [00:34:58] on. And also they can't talk directly to each other. Their only bridge would be a shout over HF. So this is going to be where we send the message from. And again it just has like a local TCP that allows it to connect to the airmemes. Now the airme has a bridge extension down here where it can egress HF traffic and this is where all those configurations are held right here. And so what we're going to see is because the origin node here because it has access to um an HF gateway when I open [00:35:31] up the conversation here it's going to give you this little toggle where you can elect to do a public broadcast. When you toggle this, you say, "Hey, if there's any HF gateways and I try to address an entity that is not on our mesh, try to do an HF transmission." This is an optional thing. You don't have to turn it on if you don't want to, but this is how we signify to cross talk. Hey, send this to the gateway and have the gateway throw a Hail Mary over HF. I should be able to send a message from here and hopefully get it over [00:36:04] here. So, I'm going to give this a go. We're going to say crossing Tim's office. And when I send this, what we should see is or what we should hear rather is the airme keying because again this reticulum instance is going to hand it to the uh to the node that has an HF gateway and the HF gateway is going to toss it over HF. The RTL should hear it and decode it and then ingress it back [00:36:34] into reticulum. Here it goes. Okay, we can hear it keying. And again, it takes like 7 seconds to get the message across. Okay, so it just stopped keying. That means it just transmitted the whole frame. And if we come over here, we can see [00:37:04] there's our message. So we just sent a reticulum frame over HF legally between two nodes basically a reticulum instance on my computer and a reticulum instance just on this uh Android phone that do not have a path between them. and we just made that work. There's a lot that goes into these bridge extensions and things like that, but it's possible and we kept it legal because the frame is sent over plain [00:37:34] text. When we check this, we're basically saying, hey, if there's no path, then actually address it to the gateway node so that the gateway node can decrypt it, repackage it, and toss it over HF. And when it tosses it over HF on the um dipole antenna that we have over there, the RTL listens for it. And when it hears it, it says, "I just heard an HF frame. It's a reticulum frame." And it has the final LXMF address. And then it wraps it into a new proper [00:38:04] reticulum uh packet addressed to right here. Yeah. So that's how we're able to relay a message over HF. Well, that's miracle number two. We created an HF frame designed around amateur radio rules that we can use with Reticulum. And yes, learning enough about this space to even attempt a project like this took a lot of work. So, I put those hard one insights, the hardware, software, radio systems, and how they all fit together into Parallel Primer, a [00:38:36] course designed to help you start building your own infrastructure. And I'll leave a link to that in the description below. But this message crossed only my office. Now we have to take it into the field and find out how far it can actually go. I'm trying to cancel the middleman. Apparently, there's some assembly required. Across my office, the mismatched antenna didn't matter much. The radios were practically sitting beside each other. But if we wanted to test any meaningful distance, we needed an antenna actually designed for 28 MHz. And since I wanted to drive [00:39:07] around while the Airmes stayed in my office, I grabbed a 10 m mobile whip antenna for the RTL. It uses a few magnetic mounts to attach to the hood of my car. I spent a few days messing with this thing and using this nano VNA to understand how it was tuned. Go to display trace. Kill off this. Kill off this. Kill off this. And then let's put this in the right range. So we're going to do stimulus start 20 megahertz stop [00:39:39] 40 megahertz. Okay. So now we can see that dip, right? So we want to see where that dip actually is. So it's around 29 MHz. It's not ideal. We want 28. Sometimes changing the coax. So I just adjusted the coax. Now it's deeper, but it's still around that 29 [00:40:09] MHz area. But I think that'll be okay because look, if you come over to 28 MHz, well, you can see it's not ideal, honestly. Like, we would want that dip to be closer to 28 MHz. And that's something I can mess around with by adjusting like the length of it. But I think for now, for our testing, I'm just going to go with this. It's just not exactly where we're going to be transmitting, but I think that's okay. I'm going to be honest. I don't know whether I have this ground plane set up correctly. I just know it's closer to 28 MHz than the Laura Whip antenna. And on [00:40:39] the feed line, the shield and the core have to stay apart. At first, they weren't, but now they are. So, this right here, that is actual core. So, this is actually going to carry the signal. And this bolt right here is also core. So, this part is also core. So, it can't be touching the ground plane, which would be this or the shielding underneath. And that's why we have this plastic washer right here. But let me show you the core even further right here. Yeah, I don't know if you can see [00:41:10] it, but there's a there's an insulating ring of plastic around the core that separates the nut underneath. And then you use this to keep them separate. So, this comes down like this and it keeps that core off of the ground plane essentially. And then this comes and secures that down. And I didn't have that right at first and so the signal was all over the place. So now you have a proper kind of ground plane which is the shell, the coax, this potentially [00:41:40] even the the car itself. But if you touch this, you mess up the signal cuz this is this is core right here. Yeah. So to mount this, all we do is grab this and then screw it on like this. Okay. And then we have our whip. The Haven will be in my car listening for the shouts from the air back in my office. The air is on the second floor of my house, so it's somewhat elevated, but it's still far from ideal. The homes in [00:42:10] this neighborhood are concrete blocks, so our air is caged inside one of them, and we'll be driving through a neighborhood with dozens more between us and the transmitter, but it's what we have for now. We also want to be meticulous about logging distance, so I'm adding this GPS receiver, which we can put on the hood. After each range test, we'll know exactly how far the message traveled. So, in the driveway, the message was working. Then came the first drive. Failure. As soon as I got down the block, this thing died. But it [00:42:40] was hard to tell whether the problem was the signal, the packet fidelity, or the decoder itself. This system isn't just about getting the message out. The message needs to arrive clearly enough for the Pi to decode it. So, I went back numerous times, getting a little more distance with each test. Now we're outside my neighborhood, but it's still failing when we enter the next neighborhood. At 1 matt, it worked. 10 m worked, too. But eventually, we hit another wall. The AirMate can transmit up to 5 watts. So, I still had plenty of [00:43:10] power available, or at least I thought I did. Instead of more range, I got this. Above 300 m, the radio became unstable and packets stopped getting through. And that led me back to the cheap power brick I had grabbed for my office. Okay, so for the Air May, we had been using this power volt because this is what I have around the office. It is a 12v 3 amp 36 watt. Um, which should be [00:43:42] adequate for this. This guy says it wants 2 amps um continuous. Um, but it's not because basically when I set the TX, like the transmit power above 300 m, this guy starts to fail and the messages don't get through. So, basically, and this guy can do a total of 5 watt. So, I'm really uh losing a ton of power there by not being able to go above 300 m. So, I bought this guy. This is more of a true ham radio power bank. I think [00:44:14] this guy is rated to let's see here. Yeah, amperage 5 amperage constant 7 amperage surge. So, this guy should be a little bit better equipped to provide the power that the AMA needs to really transmit at those higher transmit powers. So, um that's what I'm hoping for here. So, so the only thing about this guy is we have to get a barrel jack attached to these guys. I'm not 100% sure how to do that. So, so I tried the new power supply and [00:44:45] it turns out we're still not able to use more than just 2 watts without current issues, which is funny because AI specifically told me this was the power supply to buy. Then when I started troubleshooting with it, it told me I needed another power supply. So AI isn't always right. I'm out 60 bucks and I don't really want to buy another one right now. So we're going to see what we can do with what we have. Okay, so we're out here doing another test. When I transmit, it takes several seconds to finish sending the frame. Then the Pi attempts to decode it. The decoding is [00:45:16] computationally heavy. It was taking a long time and failing pretty often. But I had an idea. If you're in our subreddit, Modern Radio, you may have seen Ken, also known as Frosty, building PRNS, a high performance implementation of Reticulum written in Rust. It now even has a browser flasher at prns.dev. So that gave me the idea to try the same thing with the most computationally expensive parts of the decoder. I had cursor port them from Python into Rust, which should run faster. And that [00:45:48] actually worked. Decode times dropped to just a few seconds. The office test was easy to [clears throat] control when I could stand next to both radios. But for the range test, the Airme had to stay home while I drove the receiver around. The first few times I would cue a message with a delay, run out to the car, drive the receiver to a test point, and wait for the AirMate to transmit. Then I had to drive all the way back to my office just to find out whether the Raspberry Pi had decoded it. Every failed test meant another complete round trip, which is not a particularly [00:46:18] efficient way to debug a radio. So I built another app. So I actually came up with an app here. And so this app runs on the Pi and it uses some MeshVPN dark magic to basically make it so that we can read RTL SDR as transmissions come through. But we can also control the air and adjust parameters and send messages like ad hoc. So like I could do like a 10 matt message. I could do a 5 watt [00:46:49] message. I'll do one millowatt because both devices are in my office right now so it doesn't need much power. I can adjust the message and say like I don't know test and then also down in advanced here I can adjust the gain on the RTL SDR. So because the RTL is in the same room we're going to do a gain of zero and it should still be able to hear the message. So like now when I drive out I can send a message and it will tell me if the message got through or not. um [00:47:19] and if it was decoded properly by the Pi, if the fidelity was high enough that it could decode. And it also give me gives me some readouts here like SNR, the receiver gain, etc. So, let's just try sending this message test. And again, everything is in my office right now, but once we go on the road and uh you know, navigate about, we can do the same process here and we'll know right away if the message got through. So, I'm just going to go ahead and click send. Okay, that click you heard was the armes keying and it's still keying. It will [00:47:52] tell us when Okay, so it just stopped keying. Yeah, so that was very quick. Basically, it said that we sent the message, but then the Pi had to like decode it. And so you can see the entire frame here. You can see the message test and you can see that it was successfully decoded by the Pi. So now, because we have this app, I can bring this into the car. And the Pi will be connected to this guy's hotspot. That's what like that little ring is right there. And this phone is on tail scale. My home [00:48:22] network has tail scale set up. And so that's how we're able to control the air maze remotely and then also get the results in real time. So yeah, I know that's pretty complicated, but um it's going to make this testing a hell of a lot easier. Okay, so we've got our rig back there. Um GPS antenna is actually right there. It's on the roof. Um okay. And then what we're going to do is drive out a little bit and um we're going to try to send [00:48:53] some messages here. So let's go out of the street a little bit. Okay. So we're just a little bit up the street and we're going to try to get uh a message through from here and see if it works. Okay. So, I am a little bit up the street now. Um, so what we can try to do is send a message here. So, I'm just going to, um, type something in here. Just going to do range07. So, that's our message. Our transmit power is going to be 1 matt. We still [00:49:23] have zero gain on the RTL SDR because we're so close that I don't think we're going to need any. And, um, yeah, 1 matt is like nothing. But, interestingly, this has been working for me. So, let's go ahead and send this. Okay, it says transmitting. And you can see SNR hop up to 32, which is very healthy. Okay, it's done. And so, if we come down here and we can see it was immediately decoded by the Pi. So, range07, that's our frame. So, in my [00:49:54] neighborhood, I'm pretty easily catching these data packets. So, we're going to keep going out a little bit further. Okay, so we are over two miles away from our base station. And you can see um that I have uh the quarterwave whip antenna. I have the GPS right here and then I have the RTLSDR right here. What we can do is uh try to send a message together. here. So, I'm going to go over to [00:50:26] the app here and get my so I can see what's going on here. Okay. So, you can see the app here. Uh, we're getting live readings. So, let's try to send a message right here. So, I'm going to send hello. And let's see if we can't get this to go through. Okay, it just transmitted. It's waiting for the Pi. I'm not sure [00:50:56] that one's going to get decoded here. So, let's see. Okay, so it doesn't actually look like that went through. And sometimes we have to tweak the gain on the RTL or the transmit power. Although, it was working a second ago. So, I'm going to give it another shot. All right, we're going to bump up the transmit power to 940 m and we will do H3 this time. And then we'll go ahead and click send. I'm going to do a short message. R1. See here. [00:51:27] Okay, we just got one through. Took a little bit of finessing, but you can see R1 decoded. So, basically, you have two parameters you're working with here, which is the gain on the receiver antenna, the RTL gain, and also the transmit power, and actually also the size of the frame. So, which is like how much data you're putting in the message. Um, so there's a couple different parameters there. Um, but we're able to get messages. Uh, we're over 2 miles right now. And this is not line of sight. We have neighborhoods between us. [00:51:58] So, I feel pretty good about that. Boom. Right there. So, you could see that we just turned up the transmit power and it helped us get a message through. And to be clear, tail scale was carrying only the remote control and telemetry. The packet whose range I was measuring still had to travel entirely over HF. After driving around town, I eventually got a clean decode 2 mi away. It was still a local test, but the bridge had carried a real reticulum message from the airme in my office to [00:52:30] the receiver in my car. Now, it might occur to you that this is an awful lot of work just to own my own communication. It is. I agree. But if this were only about sending a text, it would be insane. But it isn't. The problem with middlemen isn't merely privacy or monthly fees. It's actually their ability to control our action potential in the digital world. This is another concept that Mark Reticulum's founder harped on when he spoke about it. Remember back in 2021 when GameStop stock got caught up in that massive [00:53:01] short squeeze. There was unprecedented volatility around the stock and to day traders, volatility is how money is made. But Robin Hood was a centralized middleman and it restricted trades. So imagine spending a lifetime developing an investment thesis and when your window of opportunity finally arrives, the rug gets pulled out from under you. Whatever you think of about that week, people discovered that someone was standing between them and the market, someone who could say no. But Robin [00:53:31] Hood's hands were somewhat forced to remain legal. It couldn't have infinite exposure. And that's what ultimately led to the restrictions. Now, I'm not critiquing a corporation. I'm critiquing the architecture that made that situation possible. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap flip that architecture. The website can still be pressured or restricted, but the underlying protocol has no broker in the middle who can simply turn off the buy button. But middlemen don't only gatekeep. They also know things about [00:54:01] you that they can later be compelled to hand over. In 2004, that's exactly what happened when a Chinese journalist used his Yahoo account to send an email summarizing government instruction given to the media. His offense was literally sending an email. Yahoo provided account information that helped Chinese authorities identify him. He was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in prison. Yahoo's defense was that they had to obey local law. And again, that's precisely the point. The architecture [00:54:31] put his identity in the hands of a middleman who could be forced to surrender it. Silicon Valley tried to deal with these unprecedented levels of power by creating principles. Google famously had one called don't be evil. But greater still is can't be evil. And that's the ambition behind decentralized blockchains and permissionless networks like Reticulum. Use math to reduce the amount of trust we have to place in anyone standing in the middle. And it's a better model. Okay, stepping off my soap box now. Every time I extended the [00:55:02] link, another fundamental part of the system needed work. Sunday was 2 days away. I could move messages around the neighborhood, but I still hadn't built the test represented by this map. At that point, this wasn't about local range anymore. I wasn't going to prove Skyway by taking another drive around the neighborhood. A real test needed someone hundreds of miles away listening on the same frequency with my decoder while the band was open. They wouldn't need another airme or even a license to transmit. Potentially, they would only need a $37 receiver, an antenna, and a [00:55:34] computer, but they would need to be in the right place at the right time, running software I had only just finished building. I had built everything I could test alone. The final obstacle wasn't purely technical anymore. It was logistical, and the deadline was now only a few hours away. So, I kept working. I kept testing the decoder, fixing the power problems, and trying to turn all this radio gear into something another person could actually operate because I had made myself one promise at the beginning of this project. When the clock ran out, I was [00:56:04] going to ship whatever I had. And Sunday came and Sunday went and I had never made it to the Skywave test. And this is where my perfectionism would usually get the better of me. I would keep working and you would keep waiting and I wouldn't show you anything until the result looked like the one I had imagined. But this time I had committed to publishing the good, the bad, and the ugly. So whether I liked it or not, it was time to ship this part of the project, which was a bit of a bummer. But honestly, I had come a long way from where I had originally started. A few [00:56:34] weeks ago, I didn't know how to use an SDR like this or interpret a waterfall. I had never listened for APRS traffic or picked up a real FTA message. I didn't know what it meant for the band to close and then reopen. I had no idea how to verify that an antenna was tuned for the frequency I was using, why touching the coax could move the center frequency, or how ground planes worked. Well, I still don't understand ground planes, but the other things I do now. I built the antennas. I learned how to listen. I heard other people doing the thing I [00:57:04] came here to do across distances I honestly wouldn't have believed this little radio could cover. And somewhere in all that static, I started to understand what this was actually going to take. And maybe the status quo exists for a reason. Because after a year of trying to escape what I half- jokingly call the communication cartels, I had somehow subscribed to nearly everything they sold. Fiber, Verizon, Starlink, and now Aridium. In trying to cancel the middleman, I was somehow also becoming their best customer. Still, we proved a [00:57:34] few key things. First, this receiving setup decoded a digital transmission from Bogotaa, roughly 1,600 miles away. That proves we can push beyond the horizon. [music] Second, we proved our bridge worked. We used an ordinary reticulum node to send a message [music] to a licensed gateway. The gateway converted it into a public call [music] signidentified HF frame and transmitted it over the air. The receiver decoded it, [music] rebuilt the message, and delivered it to an ordinary reticulum [00:58:04] node on the other side. But in spite of all that progress, we still hadn't done what we originally set out to accomplish. We wanted to prove that two people separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles could still reach each other without a cell tower, a private satellite, or anyone in between giving them permission. I haven't proved that yet, but I'm a hell of a lot closer than when I started, but I still haven't fully succeeded, and that bothers me. The goal of this channel is to build a free open- source internet that we [00:58:34] actually own using tools built by the people for the people. Because if we can get a message to originate from a reticulum network in, say, Germany, bounce [music] off the sky, touch down in North America, and bridge back into a reticulum network here in the States. [music] Well, that might change everything. Somewhere on the other side of this map, somebody already has the other half of this test. Now I just have to find them. For more, click here.