The past week has been a very eventful one for MeshCore in Florida. The event that triggered everything was the south Florida group creating a couple of RF links to connect south Florida to Orlando. It appears that they may have created a link to connect up the west coast of Florida too.
This has been good in the sense that a lot more of the state of Florida is connected and there are a lot more people out there to talk to. The bad news is there is a lot more airtime being used with a moderate portion of the messages being transmitted that don’t need to be seen in other areas.
One of the things that dab-bot does is to send out some of the Volusia County Sheriff’s active calls on the #alerts channel. If you are in the DeLand / Daytona Beach area, you may have been seeing these alerts. Well that is until recently. They probably stopped a day or two ago for you as they now have a region code on the messages to limit how far they get repeated.
MeshCore region codes is something that most people on MeshCore have not used or have a good knowledge of. But they are there to keep the MeshCore network from being overwhelmed which when this happens is a much bigger problem to solve. We really don’t want those headaches.
So MeshCore region codes are a good thing, but it is going to take a while and a bunch of user education for them to be used effectively. This all really stems from a couple of philosophies that boil down to not using more resources than necessary. This is exemplified with the ham radio practice of not using more transmit power than required to make a contact. In the MeshCore world this translates into don’t use more airtime than necessary.
OK, back on topic (my ADD is showing…..). Since the VCSO alerts that dab-bot produces are specific to Volusia County there is no need to transmit them further than Volusia County. In the MeshCore world the way to handle this is with a region code. So dab-bot now adds the volusia region code to all the VCSO alerts.
Now unfortunately this is not an automatic thing that just magically works. The repeaters have to be told to handle messages with the region code. So this means that the repeaters in Volusia County need to be updated to handle the volusia region code. The DAB repeater standards page has been updated with information about the recommended region codes. If you have a repeater, then you probably want to visit this page and add the region codes to your repeater.
Adding the volusia region to your repeater does not guarantee that you will start seeing the VCSO alerts again. This is because all the repeaters between you and dab-bot (DeLand, FL) need to also know about the volusia region code. So you may need to work with your neighboring repeater owners to ensure that they are aware of the region codes and have added them to their repeaters. Once all the repeaters have been updated, then the alerts will be seen again.