Turkey earthquake: please keep 28.540 clear for communications (opens in new tab)

A route on a mesh network is only as big as the smallest link. Of course as a general substitute for connectivity it holds little promise. Like any technology it has its pluses and minuses.

In situations without access to a fat, centralized link or situations where resilience is more important than bandwidth or latency, mesh networks are a great choice. Emergencies are such situations but remote areas or low power needs are other situations suited for mesh networks.

i really don't want to be this person, but Starlink is a mesh network, i have a crap connection to it, and i still routinely get over 200mbit download and 30-50mbit uploads. and a ping 1/3rd of my at&t connection (minimums around 19ms, which i haven't seen since i lived on the west coast)

> After all if it worked you wouldn't need carriers at all, yet here they are...

It'd work fine in more dense areas. Probably not the higher band 5G stuff, but lower bands and 4G. There's no carrier incentive to do this, that's why OP said "mandated".

This is super cool. Do you have more details about hardware, software and radio interface?

We had the weird thing involving wired headphones, yes.

A good rule of thumb is that if your phone has a headphone jack, it also has FM radio. And whether it has a headphone jack depends on whether the phone aims to be waterproof.

Waterproof phone = no headphone jack = no FM radio. There are some exceptions, but it's more often true than not.

I believe in this context "radio" is "commercial radio", like what's available in a car.

No, it's just that apple disabled it first and many others blindly followed. My samsung s10 still has FM radio (and phone jack). It's also energy efficient

Many phones had FM, but if you look the models for Verizon had FM disabled. The international versions had FM, AT&T had FM, Verizon didn't. They are also much more likely to lock their bootloader, and other anti-consumer things.

The older Freestyle (IIRC) also had this. It was my first "smartphone" before I got a real smartphone. I actually kind of miss being able to listen to the radio that way. Not sure how well it'd work these days since most people use wireless headphones.

My old flip phone used the earphone as the antenna. The radio wouldn't work without it plugged in.

EDIT: It was a Nokia 6086, and the radio was an FM receiver.

https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6086-1798.php

https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=1138

Anything that plugs into the head phone jack acts as the antenna.

is it? please provide proof. afaik it's a kneefall to Spotify/apple music/youtube music

Ha! I never caught that before.... but now that you point it out, I can see it. I appreciate that you pointed that out. That said, I could also honestly see someone saying that in earnest.

Many hand-cranked emergency radios can receive on the shortwave band (2-22MHz), like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Raynic-Emergency-Portable-Flashlight-...

Note that all portable multiband radios will have an antenna optimized for 87-108MHz. If you want to receive shortwave better you'll need to add a couple dozen feet of wire to the antenna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortwave_broadband_antenna

You’re thinking of typical radio broadcasts. Hams use radio for intercontinental communication all the time.

Radio France allegedly covers 99+% of the population and the emitters are backupped. There is provisions to allow a single announcement to be broadcast by the 5 national and 44 local stations at the same time.

Twitter Spaces... perhaps for people in the West with intellectual curiosity about the play by play.

For people on the ground it was Telegram groups and channels. "TG" is huge in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

This is mild pedantry from me, sorry.

Fortunately, the 10m band these days has a reach of up to 11000km due to the solar activity. You are quite right that during LOS conditions it’s limited to the elevation of the antenna.

Its relatively small antenna needed (5m dipole) and can be used to access some distances, just not ones that might be in the same country as origin because of the skip dead zone from the ionospheric refraction angle. Which depending how it might be used, could be useful.

The general rule of thumb is to check the MUF Rating at the time of day collected from ionosondes such as that on https://prop.kc2g.com/

I'm not trained in emergency ham operations, but I assume they know what they are doing. They're a community which is enthusiastic about their utility in crisis, I mean this in a good way.

When breaking news makes it to HN that's when it's the most worrying

It was posted here, though likely rather quickly deranked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672314

Not that person, but I'm the same way.

You just... stop caring. The only two good reasons to pay attention to news are if it affects you in some way, or if you can do anything about it. The vast majority of news is in neither group.

That's the first pass. From there, you adjust your definition of "affects you". I'm in the US, for example, and our government does plenty of bad things I do not approve of. But most of them, even the ones that ostensibly should affect me, don't actually noticeably change anything in my life. After a while, it all blurs into "my team scored a point" or "the other team scored a point".

Is this privileged? Of course. But it's also a requirement for my mental health. Paying attention to it wouldn't even improve anything for the people who are suffering, so there's not even any sort of utilitarian tradeoff. It would just be making my life worse for no reason, so I don't.

People are apparently really surprised but I simply had a busy day today. I have not been sleeping well so I was tired this morning. I woke up and worked on a programming problem that had been on my mind all weekend, listened to one of my favorite youtube channels that talks about news usually a day or two after it happens, posted an update on my programming project to mastodon without reading the feed, entertained my cat before leaving the house, ordered lunch from a local takeout place, made my partner a matcha latte, picked up lunch, brought my partner the matcha and gave them a beanie I knit last week, then drove to work listening to a couple podcasts. At work I got a delivery of circuit boards and I am now debugging a hardware problem and listening to the latest episode of Well There's Your Problem.

Idk one thing I do not ever do is open a website like CNN or NYT and read the front page. Please don't misunderstand that statement of fact as a judgement, but you asked about my media habits so I am sharing that. I will hear about major news events, as this very post makes clear. It seems I am hearing about this major earthquake in Turkey 14 hours or so after it happened... which seems fine. There is nothing I can do.

I tend to get news from youtube sources (not major outlets though) and these creators take a day or two to produce their videos. Sometimes I listen to Democracy Now or the KPFA evening news (available online), but I do not regularly consume that kind of thing. I am doing as much as I can to help the world with my little nonprofit thing. I learn about things like the police killing in Memphis police killing, the situation with the police training center outside of Georgia, and various foolish things politicians do. But I don't have much appetite for the firehose of details that come out of major news outlets.

I also want to be direct with intent to offend. What is it about world events that demands your attention? Are outcomes going to be worse for your lack of awareness? Will people be hurt if you stop paying attention or be helped if you do?

I personally take a great interest in the challenges my local community faces because I can be directly and verifiably helpful.

You can just not read the news. I generally don't, since I've found it rarely enhances my life.

Speaking personally, I just don't usually open Twitter or news sites while I'm at the office.

It's not that I don't care. (I do.) I just read everything at a digest at the end of the day. Most news doesn't require a real-time response. Trying to stay on top of everything happening, as it happens 24x7, just leads to emotional exhaustion.

If it's not something I have direct control over, I don't need a real-time feed of it. The news will still be there to read in the evening when I get home.

Yep, just don't check the news. Very little affects your day to day.

Grab the Sunday paper if you want to be periodically checked in. I think I'd be happier if I did this. I don't need to read the nyt opinion section every day, or what lie some congressman from New York just told.

I need to fold my clothes and schedule my vacation and research for work.

This happened quite recently: Had my head in a screen of code pretty much and first I heard of this. Shocked that I didn’t hear it over slack though.

It's okay. If you are in the West (Europe) you probably heard of this. If you are in the US or Australia, probably not. I am in SEA and no one has any idea of this going on. It goes the same way though, the Middle-East doesn't hear much about earthquakes in the Philippines or Indonesia.

The only exception I can think of is Japan. It seems everyone is aware of Japan earthquakes/Tsunamis.

What newspaper do you read, that didn't cover this news today?

Interesting. For me, this started popping up last night all over facebook and instagram, and every major news outlet in Australia started talking about it during the night.

I also didn't find out until this evening. I don't watch TV (only prerecorded series/movies), don't use Twitter at all, and I only really read tech news sites during the day. I don't even have a live TV subscription anymore. Most of it is just so commercial and crap and I was sick of paying for it. :) I have zero interest in sports. And I never do podcasts nor YouTube.

I generally just don't care enough about what happens in the world anymore, though this particular quake is really terrible of course. But there's nothing I can do about it.

Just once a day or so I might check the local newspaper website, for things that might affect me. Which is where I heard about it because something this big will make the front page even there.

But generally I don't miss the world news at all, I don't feel FOMO or less informed. I'm not a boring person either IMO, I just like being active in tech and the creative (maker) community, with things I can actually influence. I'm very interested in people I meet. It's more about taking control of information.

I do the same with instant messaging. I can be quite active but only on my terms. All my group chats are muted, and all but the most important people too. I'll see your messages eventually but when it suits me. If it was urgent you'd have called anyway.

It's good to know about this band assignment though as I'm also a HAM operator. But I don't use the 10m band that this frequency is on anyway.

There's a certain calm that comes from closing the news sites and social networking feeds, and just checking everything as a digest at the end of the work day.

Staying informed is good, but there are relatively small number of things that need a reaction in real-time. Eventual consistency is sufficient, and frees cognitive cycles for things I have immediate influence over.

No need to be amazed. I have had a busy day, I don't use Twitter much anymore, and I haven't checked any news sites today. Anyway there were no comments and I just wanted to add context for anyone who missed it (like me).

Germany has a huge number of people who are either from Turkey or have relatives in Turkey and yet the media coverage of this was surprisingly low-key considering the number of casualties and that it's an ongoing crisis. It was hard to miss if you actually checked news sources but the sheer number of casualties and missing persons is easy to overlook from how it is being reported on.

I was deep into a hyper fixation hole at work today and crawled out of it only to hear about this tragedy. It felt pretty weird...

At the very least even the less hard news consuming folks have probably seen that picture of the street that got turned into something resembling a bowl of black corn flakes.