When the towers go down, neighbors still talk.
Liberty Hill Mesh is one of several things worth having before a storm, and the smallest of them. It is neighbors with radios, checking on each other: no agency operates it, nobody is on duty, and it cannot send help. What it does is keep passing text messages on solar power when cell service is gone, which is when the other ways of reaching your road stop working.
This is not an official emergency service. No agency runs it, nobody is on duty, and no one is obligated to answer. It is not monitored, it cannot dispatch help, and it is not a substitute for anything below. It is one more way to reach your neighbors when the usual ways are down.
Set these up first. They come before the mesh.
Every one of these reaches more people than we do, and the first two can send help. If you only do one thing after reading this page, make it one of these rather than buying a radio.
- 911
- Call, or text 911 if a call will not go through. Dispatchers can send an ambulance, a deputy, or a fire crew. The mesh cannot.
- County emergency alerts
- Williamson County sends evacuation notices, boil-water notices and weather warnings through WarnCentralTexas.org. You have to register a phone number or email to get them; it is not automatic. If that site will not load, the county links it from wilcotx.gov too. Their alert calls come from 512-864-8282, so save that number.
- Wireless Emergency Alerts
- The alerts that arrive on your phone with no sign-up, for flash floods and tornado warnings. They are on by default. Check they have not been switched off.
- A NOAA weather radio
- Battery powered, no cell service and no internet needed, and it wakes itself up for a warning. For a town in flash flood country this is the cheapest useful thing in the house.
The mesh is not on this list and should not be. What follows is what it adds once these are in place: neighbor-to-neighbor traffic that no official system carries, because carrying it is not their job.
If something is happening right now
Try 911 first, every time
If a call or a text gets through, use it. Dispatchers can send help; the mesh cannot. Reach for the radio when nothing else is getting out.
Turn your radio on and watch both channels
Open MeshCore on your phone. #lhtx is where Liberty Hill talk happens, and the public channel is the one every radio in range can see whether or not they joined ours. In something serious, use the public channel too, because you cannot assume the person who needs to hear you has added #lhtx. Give it a minute for messages to hop in from across town.
Say where you are and what you need
One short message does more than a paragraph. "Tree down across CR 200 at the low water crossing, everyone here is okay" tells your neighbors where not to drive and that they can stop worrying about you.
Leave room for everyone else
Every radio shares the same airtime. A long message blocks the people waiting behind it, and in an emergency somebody behind you may have less time than you do.
Check the people nearest you in person
If it is safe to walk next door, do that first. The mesh is for reaching past your road, not across it. Then put what you learn on the channel so nobody drives out to check on a house that is already fine.
The part you have to do beforehand
This is the honest catch with radio, and the reason this page exists. You cannot set any of it up once the power is out and the towers are dark. A radio still in a box helps nobody.
- Get a radio and flash it. A pocket radio starts around $35. It takes an evening, and no command line.
- Pair it to your phone, set your name, and send one message on the public channel so you know it works.
- Join #lhtx, the channel for Liberty Hill. Doing it now means you are already in the room when something happens.
- Charge it, then keep it charged. Store it with your flashlight and your weather radio, not in a drawer with the old phone cables.
- Tell the neighbors on your road. One radio on your street is worth more to you than three across town, because the whole idea is that somebody close can hear you.
- Use it on ordinary days. A network nobody talks on is a network nobody notices has broken.
If cost is the thing stopping you, say so in the Facebook group or email hello@lhtx.org. There is a small, confidential budget for getting radios to people who need one. Nobody should be off the network because of $35.
Weather and flood alerts come over the radio
Volunteers behind txme.sh run bots that put National Weather Service warnings and San Gabriel river gauge readings onto the mesh automatically. They arrive as text on your radio, with no internet, no cell service, and no app notification in the middle.
For a town sitting on a river in flash flood country, that is the part worth having before you need it. A radio that is on and charged will tell you the river is coming up whether or not the towers are still standing.
What it can and cannot do
Knowing the limits ahead of time is what keeps this useful instead of disappointing.
- It carries
- Short text messages, either to one person or to the public channel that everyone can read. Automatic weather and river alerts. Your position, if your radio has GPS and you choose to share it.
- It does not carry
- Voice calls, photos, or 911. There is no dispatcher, no duty roster, and nobody who is obligated to answer. If you need an ambulance, the mesh can only help you find a neighbor who can drive.
- It needs
- A charged radio that was set up before the event. The nodes themselves run on their own solar panels and batteries, so they keep relaying through a grid outage that lasts days.
- Everyone can read the open channels
- Anyone with a radio in range sees what you post on the public channel, and #lhtx is no different: its key is derived from its name, so it is open to anyone who knows the name. Use a direct message for anything you would not say out loud on a porch.
Why neighbors, and not an agency
Liberty Hill Mesh is not an emergency service and does not try to be one. The county and the city have their own radio systems, staffed by people trained to use them, and those systems are for dispatching help.
This is the other half. It is the ordinary traffic between neighbors that official channels are not for and do not have room for: whether the low water crossing is under, whether your road is passable, whether the family at the end of it has water. In a wide outage that traffic is most of what people actually need, and it is exactly what disappears when the towers do.
Nobody owns this network, so nobody can switch it off, defund it, or decide Liberty Hill is not a priority this week. It works because a neighbor put a node on their barn and because you kept a radio charged. That is the whole arrangement.