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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

> The part I think is missing is a connection back to the cell network so that you can give people in more remote locations the ability to text the rest of the world using this as a link.

While reading their FAQ I thought of that, and if the API is open sourced or reverse-engineered, it shouldn't be too difficult to write a smartphone application which would act as a relay between to goTenna and the phone network (for instance if the relay-phone receives on the goTenna a message from A saying "SMS <num> foo bar" it could relay the "A says: foo bar" via SMS to <num>.

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Daniela, goTenna co-founder here -- back-haul is the 'easy part.' We just wanted to start with the hard part, i.e. a communication system that never requires central connectivity; a smart network with no actual central brain.

It sounds like you don't even need the hard part for a viable product: range extender for cell phones targeted at people engaged in outdoor activities but parked somewhere with cell phone reception.

Technically, this has been possible for a long time, but it is not allowed for regulatory reasons, and those regulations are not just there because somebody enjoys being a killjoy. Radio transmission and networks are a complex subject matter. Most of all, they're a scarce, common resource and it's easy to mess things up for others.

If you want real off the grid connectivity, buy or rent a sat phone or a satellite emergency notification device (there are pretty affordable choices for both).

If there were a band of legitimately useful long range spectrum that was a free for all, wouldn't there be a strong economic incentive for people to invent modulation techniques capable of functioning effectively in such a noisy environment?

Alternatively, wouldn't it be conceivable for transmitting nodes to cooperate with one another to send transmissions. For example, if N nodes all transmit encrypted content on the same band to M receivers, then the signals of all but one of those N transmitters look like noise to each of the M receivers, thus limiting the transmission rate achievable over any given channel. If instead of that approach, what if a transmitter instead used a second frequency solely for the purpose of coordinating transmissions with the other nodes so as to minimize interference which each other. In addition to coordinating when they are or are not transmitting, couldn't they selective choose different modulation techniques that are easily distinguishable from one another, and thus transmittable simultaneously.

Feel free to educate or correct me here. I know very little about this domain.

If somebody reverse engineers their API and their devices are being used illegally for mesh networking, the most likely thing is not a mesh networking revolution [1], but the FCC taking their devices off the market. Daniela's reply to your posting could be seen as endorsing this, which won't help.

[1] you can legally do this in other bands, and there are some pretty cool open source projects.

Totally agree on how the FCC might react, but I don't see how you interpreted Daniela's response as an endorsement of reverse engineering their APIs to enable illegal mesh networking.

Right ;)

It could be a whole lot simpler than this. (And a whole less secure.) In high school I had a server running that scanned email for a keyword and my cellphone number; I didn't have a smartphone. So I texted a keyword and some code to my email. Then my server would read the email, see it contained the keyword, then interpret the rest of the code I sent and execute it. This would be insanely easy (and not too secure) to implement on Android for instance.

I mean, I know it's not secure. But I had no clue it was down-vote-not-secure!

They're not downvoting you because it's not secure; they're downvoting you because you don't understand what the product does.

Then you misunderstood, or I am perpetually misunderstanding. The comment that I responded to asked for a way to use this product to send actual text messages. He wanted to relay a message to another phone via this product and then have his phone send an actual text message using information from the initial message. I gave a suggestion about how to do that.

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