The GoTenna Will Let You Communicate Without Any Connectivity | Hacker News Reader

The GoTenna Will Let You Communicate Without Any Connectivity

techcrunch.com

14 pointsfunkyy11 comments

Great idea, and a really cool product!

I've volunteered for search & rescue work before, and this sounds like a great way to help volunteers communicate. One of the big problems with volunteering is getting halfway decent communications. Just about no one who shows up has a decent map of the area, let alone something like a ham radio, but everyone has a phone.

One big question, though - how well does the GoTenna work better with data? Voice, through the regular cell phone system is almost non-existent, but texts can get through much more often. Is it the same with your GoTenna?

One other thing, being out of range of a cell tower will quickly drain the battery of a cell phone, as it tries and tries to establish communication using a high-power signal to find a tower. Will the GoTenna look like a cell tower to local cell phones?

Oh, one other thing... Is it possible to set up custom groups and send texts to that group? For example, one group of people might be North or you, and another group to the South. Could I send a text to everyone in the North? That would solve a lot of problems... And so would being able to automatically forward text to, say Facebook, to keep the outside world informed.

Daniela, goTenna cofounder here. Yes, to all of the above :)

I would actually kind of like a product like this, so I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I have some reservations. It will be interesting to see what kind of range will be actually possible. Has an actual prototype been made? Why use shopify and not Kickstarter or IndieGogo? I'm guessing they were rejected from one of those and decided to forge their own way.

PS - two accounts were made just to comment on this post - sarx88 and kaustubhvk, seem to be sockpuppets.

Hey I'm Daniela, the cofounder of goTenna. Yes, real prototypes have been made. In fact, the final product is done! That's why we didn't go the crowdfunding route because we're ready to move into manufacturing (and in fact already have).

Use our range calculator here (http://bit.ly/1qKVDEQ) to understand what your range will be in different environments and/or elevations. We've gotten up to 3.5 miles in NYC but more realistically, it's up to a mile in urban areas. Up to 50 in a skiing situation outdoors :D

Thanks for the reply.

Article that I read said that gotenna uses RSA 1024, why not 2048 or longer?

Our first device operates on frequencies that only enable 9600 baud transmissions. So we want everything as tight/small as possible in terms of packet-size so we can have a scalable networking layer

I would think it's better either to have no security and advertise as such or make the encryption of useful length.

Doing this way is akin to ddwrt having less than 2048bit ssh keys. Kinda pointless.

In case you're in NY this weekend.. come to H.O.P.E. http://hope.net - gotenna is on the vendors list!

interesting!!!1

this is really cool, finally real security!

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