L
*Fuck* JK Rowling. Do not watch Harry Potter, do not buy her books, do not support Hogwarts themeparks - you're just supporting hate.
If you need a good YA fantasy series to replace it, may I suggest [The Worst Witch](https://theworstwitch.fandom.com/wiki/The_Worst_Witch_(Book_Series)?
Harry Potter profits are going directly to anti-transgender legal cases.
Advocate.com (www.advocate.com)
@RealGene @mbroome @cannibal great question, thank you!
Coordination is required for fixed or licensed transmitters - what we did this weekend with LoRa was neither. 
Butler is ~20mi from the Green Bank telescope, so we're well out in Zone 5. I do intend to work up and submit the NRAO spreadsheet, once we figure out the details of our deployment... The relationships of the three preserves are such that directional antenna alignment among them would be orthogonal to Green Bank, so if there is any concern, we should be able to mitigate it using directional antennae.
I'll let @mbroome speak to GMRS, since we were operating under his GMRS license!
@jaythvv @mbroome @cannibal seriously!! I was really impressed with how well it worked. Obviously the nature of the cave will dictate difficulty / how many radios are needed - big booming passage will be a lot easier to span than mazes and duck-unders - but the general principal is surprisingly sound.
They had custom radios with rugged cases, tethers, and short antennae - very suitable for dropping / hanging along passage - and removed the hop limit, since it's really a straight-line comms channel, no worries about flooding. Other than that, it seemed to be pretty standard Meshtastic code - worked just fine with my consumer radios!
#makeShitMonday, #meshtastic edition, in which we made #mesh #radio connections... in a #cave!!
@mbroome and I just completed a weeklong vertical cave rescue certification course, complete with a full-day simulated rescue scenario at the end. Standard comms for cave rescue is over wired field phones - but for this one, we had mesh radios all the way down to one of the main caverns that needed vertical rigging for the rescue.
I was Entrance Control (tracks who goes in / out of the cave, relays comms from the cave to Incident Command on the surface) and had my new MeshPocket on their dark mesh, based on [Vangelis]( https://github.com/semper-ad-fundum/vangelis). @mbroome was on comms *in* the cave - and also had my little Muzi R1 mesh radio.
It's definitely not ready to be primary comms - the radios struggle with low-airspace passages and corkscrews - but it's pretty darn close! Need to add some wired bridges like [the Flamingo project](https://github.com/rbreesems/flamingo) - that project has a really [neat video](https://youtu.be/R3LtLcnrpAk) from a test in Tumbling Rock...
Mesh radio is definitely a new paradigm for cave rescue, and I think doing it in parallel with existing field-phone tech will need separate operators. I had a pretty comfy setup with a field phone to the cave in one ear and an FRS radio to Incident Command on the surface in the other - which was fine, they're both auditory processing and push-to-talk so the only challenge was making sure I pushed the right button each time. 
Taking notes was additional cognitive load, and adding mesh comms (visual processing / type to talk) pushed it well beyond anything I could have tracked in a real emergency!
Which is great to know in advance, and I really do think that when this tech matures, it will make a solid replacement for the field phones and comms wire that's been used for the past several decades...
@wendynather OMG, see if you can get a table at Central!!
https://centralrestaurante.com.pe/
One of the top ten meals of my life...
@beckett do you *want* a visit from the FBI? Because your white male cishet privilege won't prevent that. I'm frustrated with the current situation too, but seriously, this isn't funny or cute.
@jerry @xabean same here. Health insurance is by far our highest fixed expense - the ACA market is godawful expensive, and I looked at private plans but they all have some poison pill like the pre-existing condition issue you mention. We're fortunate in having no dependents, so we retired early anyway, but it's absolutely batshit.
