PowerTalkie smartRadio vs. Gotenna Mesh photon / wave shootout!
By: Frank Bryan
Tags: Decentralized, Ham Radio, Internet of Things, Amateur Radio, Gotenna

I’ll be updating this article throughout the day:

My PowerTalkie Smart radio just arrived from the IndieGogo campaign and I’ve been stoked to do a shootout between the PowerTalkie and the GOtenna Mesh to see who had the biggest gun in town. How would the GOtenna’s Mesh device, purportedly highly-tweaked for low bandwidth and high noise resilience, hold up against the PowerTalkie with enough bandwidth to send voice? Is the sacrifice of no voice for GOtenna worth it for the increased range? Is there a new Sheriff in town? Can Power Talkie give the range and the advanced voice / text / gps features?

After a few days of testing out PowerTalkie, I like it. For an initial launch, it’s surprising how stable and non-crashy the app is. Not a single crash yet. No errors. Seems to solidly send messages. NOT at 20 miles, but at a decent mile or so (each at ground level) with non-clear LOS. The buttons are not quite intuitive. Turning it on seems a little eh… and getting to connect may be a bit of an annoyance sometimes. But overrall, once connected, seems to be very stably connected. Tested on a 2014 Note 10 and a 2018 Note 8 — both seem to work just fine.

The PowerTalkie seems much more sensitive to positioning in your vehicle. Even though both the GOtenna and the PowerTalkie were on the shotgun seat, 6" below window level (within the Faraday cage of my car), the GOtenna continued to work, while the PowerTalkie could not confirm receipt of message Tx / Rx. Not surprisingly, much better range if holding it out the window (or velcroed to the dash or carabinered to the rearview mirror or sunshades). PowerTalkie also seems to have slightly subpar building penetration relative to the Gotenna Mesh. Mesh seems to work from inside the house, while the PowerTalkie required a walk to the window to get a signal. However, the PowerTalkie was able to get signal, when switched from the 4ish inch rubber ducky antenna to a Nagoya 771 (BaoFeng style) through the interior of the building. That’s definitely an advantage to PowerTalkie on providing the external antenna connection. I wish Gotenna would follow-suit on their Mesh model like their Pro model and allow for external antennas. But, the internal Mesh antenna is not too bad :)

In sum, the Gotenna and the PowerTalkie seem to have almost eerily identical range, the Gotenna does seem to be a more mature platform / app, with slightly higher intuitiveness and ease of use. For example, Gotenna Mesh app immediately shows transmission and indicates visually that the confirmation has or has not returned — making it much easier to use. In contrast, PowerTalkie only indicates (with some delay) if a message has failed to go through.

Obviously, PowerTalkie, without any mesh / repeater / or rebroadcasting features, has a lot less heavy-lifting to do relative to the GOtenna’s ability to rebroadcast the message up to 6 hops through the network and out, via Twilio’s SMSrelay to any phone number in the world OR via the SDK or Mesh Developer Toolkit for gateways / data uplink to the internet. While PowerTalkie and GOtenna only seem to offer miles of range on direct transmissions, the 6X mesh repeat, the unlimited nature of backhauling seems to give the advantage to GOtenna. The more interesting shootout will be between GOtenna Mesh and the Sonnet Labs Mesh (out ANY TIME!)

Certainly, GOtenna is the more patriotic choice for domestic use in the United States as GOtenna is a Made in America company, founded by some local kids after Hurricane Sandy hit NY and now supplies their Gotenna tactical mesh devices to every single U.S. military branch and practically every agency in Homeland Security. Gotenna is literally Q-branch, dropping some 007 style comms devices in non-threatening purple lipstick-size cases without apparent antennas or anything.

Now that GOtenna, is no longer a small fish / startup, and has firmly established itself as a solid government contractor with tens of millions invested from both BBG Ventures and Walden Venture Capitol — not to mention the substantial investments from IQT, DHS, DOD, DOJ, CBP, and FEMA… , GOtenna should stand up and honor their commitments and promises to help provide some emergency backup communications for Puerto Rico made back in 2017. Respectfully, if GOtenna is going to walk away from Puerto Rico, they should at least re-donate the thousands of dollars they accepted to someone who will apply that money towards disaster relief. Maybe RedCross? The people that donated deserve some transparency. It’s been two years and the organizers of the fundraiser have made no publication of any of the promised 300+ GOtenna mesh devices or how to use the Text911 service.

INITIAL REVIEW OF POWER TALKIE BELOW:

I wanted to get my thoughts out immediately so people who may want them can order before Hurricane season and the tropical storms.

PowerTalkie advertises 20 mile range for text / gps / aprs (about 128 bytes per message payload) and 10 mile range for Voice live or recorded with pretty good fidelity. A bit of skepticism is warranted. But, at 462MHz with SMA antennas and 2 watts, line of sight (LOS) at altitude, I’m expecting more like a few miles. I will update as soon as we’ve got some hard figures. So far, only about a mile, at most on range. But seems to be rock solid. No flakeouts or loss of connection, everything pretty much gets through.

First impressions are that the software is easy to use and download in the Android Play store. Only about 11MB. Allows for anonymous / airplane mode registration (simulating a network down offline .apk install) and was pleasantly surprised that everything can be accomplished offline in theatre.

Two devices, so far, the Samsung Note 10.1" 2014 version and the 2018 Note 8 were able to install the app and establish contact (text, gps, and voice) 10/10 would recommend. Both devices came with stub antennas, I upgraded via the SMA connector to add bigger after-market antennas (compatible with the BaoFeng antennas, e.g., Nagoya 770 / 771 and 701.

The PowerTalkie Devices are waterproof IP68 Milspec and have a giant 6000MAh battery with full size USB-A host charger and micro-usb charging input so they can either charge your phone, or be charged by your phone, or any micro-usb phone charger.

Contrary to the advertised 2.4Amp and 2.1Amp advertisement, I’m only seeing about 420MA (.42 A) output / input… buy my ammeter / multimeter may be malfunctioning?

Will be very interested to see if BaoFeng / Yaesu / FRS / GMRS / SDR radios are able to hear the voice transmission? At 462 MHz, I believe it would be legal for any ham or walkie to listen in that GMRS range, and broadcast (within power limits) during an emergency. This may be better than Gotenna in the fact that the comms *MAY* have an outlet to non-proprietary devices. It depends, I’d imagine if the audio is encoded or analog? I’ll be updating as soon as I have results.

The GPS / aprs / civtak / ctak / atak type offline maps are decent, and seem intuitive. Unlike GOtenna (Made In The USA), however, this appears to be a Chinese comms company and some of the privacy / national security concerns about DJI and HuaWei may be relevent here as well. Also, unlike Gotenna, these PowerTalkies will obviously not have access to actual Civtak / ATAK or APRS without plugins?

The physical user-interface is perhaps over-simplified. Only two buttons: ON and SOS. No knobs, dials, volume… reading the user manual will be helpful. But the App seems simple enough to use.

Importantly, and differently from Gotenna, you must actively enable Map / Location Sharing if you want to be seen by other users in the vicinity. Then the user must approve connection before any transmissions?

I will provide updates as we go. I do not believe the Text or GPS messages are encrypted. So I don’t think HIPAA data may be shared unlike Gotenna.

SOS, Group, and 1:1 messaging (voice / text) and GPS offline map team location sharing is enabled and seems to be working without a hitch.

Early version of the app may have the bluetooth persistence problems that GOtenna suffers and seems like, on the Note 8, at least, that connection must be re-established manually occassionally.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/powertalkie-the-advanced-off-network-comms-device#/