The Wind & Wireless 2025 Retrospective
December 26, 2025 • Filed under: Annual Review, Operations, R&D
If 2024 was about establishing Wind & Wireless as a concept, 2025 was about building its technical foundation. This year took us from the wide-open test ranges of the Mojave Desert to the complex regulatory airspace of San Francisco, with deep technical dives into FPV drones and mesh networking along the way.
The Magazine Experiment
This year also saw us produce 4 complete magazine issues covering science, weather, and social topics. While each issue had its own content focus, the real breakthrough was learning the medium itself. From those 4 issues, we discovered something crucial: We wanted to create a "standing zine website," a permanent digital space where our technical explorations could live and evolve. This realization became the foundation for everything you're reading now.
Here's what we built, broke, learned, and launched in 2025:
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Meshtastic Router Deployed
The Year's Core Lesson
Technical mastery isn't about avoiding failure, it's about building a relationship with it. Every crashed drone, every debug session, every regulatory hurdle became data points in a larger understanding of systems, signals, and space.
Wind & Wireless on YouTube
2025 marked our transition from written content to visual storytelling. Each episode explored a different intersection of technology, environment, and logistics—establishing the channel's technical depth while maintaining accessibility.
Episode 1: Creating the first video
Covered VHF/UHF propagation, antenna theory, and practical field setups. Demonstrated how to establish reliable comms in remote areas using minimal equipment. AI video generation tools had JUST become available and I wanted to experiment with them, see how useful they could be in the workflow.
Episode 2: Making a cadence
By episode 2, I wanted to establish a cadence for posting. It was helpful to build a system to have filming days, editing days, posting days, etc.
Episode 3: Explore Feedback
By Episode 3, I'd gotten a feel for the scope required to produce something with substance. However, the comments were along the lines of "I can tell you are passionate, but the AI images are distracting."
Episode 4: Sunset
By episode 4 I had a good understanding of the scope involved with producing a weekly video. The experiment was a HUGE success. The episodes were a good start and helped us find the topics we wanted to cover. However, the use of AI made them 'un-digestible' to our audience. So, time for a change :)
MARCH 2025
Episode 1 Launch: Our first foray into video. Learned that AI tools could accelerate production but also created a noticeable disconnect with viewers.
JUNE 2025
Cadence Established: Developed production rhythms and systems. The process became more efficient, but viewer feedback about AI imagery grew more consistent.
SEPTEMBER 2025
Experiment Concluded: Wrapped the video series with clear lessons: we found our topics and production rhythm, but needed to pivot away from AI-generated visuals for better audience connection.
The FPV Progression
This year took us through every major category of consumer and prosumer drone technology. We lived in the technical stack, from analog video systems to digital HD, from tiny whoops to long-range cruisers.
Tiny Whoop Era
Started with 75mm analog 1S whoops. Mastered indoor flying, acro mode fundamentals, and battery management. Lost our first frame to an enthusiastic encounter with a ceiling fan.
3"-5" Progression
Graduated to larger frames for outdoor flight. Learned PID tuning, camera control, and failsafe procedures. The 5" freestyle quad became our workhorse for technical filming.
Long-Range Mastery
Built and flew 7" 6S long-range rigs capable of 100+ MPH and 20+ minute flights. Implemented GPS rescue, telemetry systems, and crossed the 5km distance threshold.
Technical Iterations & Improvements
Frame Losses Were Data Points: Each crash taught us about structural limits, harmonic vibrations, and failure modes. We learned which components fail first under stress.
Digital Transition: Migrated from analog to digital (Caddix / Walksnail) systems. The latency/quality tradeoff analysis alone could be its own whitepaper.
Tooling Evolution: Developed custom battery maintenance routines, field repair kits, and pre-flight checklists that helped reduce failures by year's end.
"The Whole Sphere" Achievement
By December 2025, we could confidently:
• Diagnose video interference sources and implement mitigation
• Calculate battery requirements for specific missions
• Tune flight controllers for specific performance profiles
• Navigate both FAA Part 107 and recreational flight regulations
• Repair all major components in the field
Attained understanding of systems and mastery of aerial robotics platforms.
The Meshtastic Journey
While drones conquered vertical space, Meshtastic projects explored horizontal communication networks. This was a return to embedded systems, radio physics, and infrastructure thinking.
APRIL 2025
Hardware Learning Phase: Started with LilyGO T-Beams and Heltec modules. Relearned embedded C++ for ESP32 platforms. Configured first node-to-node communication in line-of-sight conditions.
JULY 2025
Coverage Survey: Used drones to create elevation maps for network planning. Tested propagation through different environments (urban canyon vs. open desert). Documented the dramatic difference terrain makes.
OCTOBER 2025
Full Deployment: Deployed a 5-node network covering approximately 12 square kilometers. Each node considered power (solar vs. battery), mounting (height vs. security), and redundancy (multiple paths).
Embedded Skills Refresh
Reacquainted with platform-specific compilation, debugging via serial, and power management. The ESP32's deep sleep modes became crucial for solar-powered nodes.
Propagation Analysis
Learned to predict coverage using topographic data. Discovered that 915MHz LoRa behaves very differently than 2.4GHz WiFi—sometimes bending over ridges, sometimes blocked by foliage.
Deployment Logistics
Each node required power calculations, weatherproofing, and physical security. Developed a deployment checklist that reduced site visits by 60% through better upfront planning.
Network Thinking vs. Device Thinking
The biggest shift was moving from "device-centric" to "network-centric" thinking. A single Meshtastic node is useless. Value emerges at 3+ nodes. Reliability emerges at 5+ with redundant paths. This changed how we approached all infrastructure projects.
The Great Relocation
Moving from the regulatory freedom of Mojave Desert to the complex airspace of San Francisco required completely rethinking how we operate. The Mojave is the flight test and research center for a reason: Clear Skys.
Mojave Operations
Class G airspace below 14,500ft. Launch whenever weather permits. Test new configurations without LAANC authorization. The perfect environment for rapid iteration and failure.
San Francisco Reality
Class B shelf starting at surface. LAANC required nearly everywhere. Complex airspace layers (SFO bravo, Oakland charlie). Noise considerations. Population density changing risk calculations.
Adaptation Strategy
Shifted from "fly first, adjust later" to "plan meticulously, fly precisely." Invested in advanced airspace awareness tools. Developed relationships with local operators. Learned the nuance of urban drone operations.
Regulatory Nuance Mastery
San Francisco taught us:
• How to read Sectional Charts for urban environments
• When to use LAANC vs. manual authorization
• How to coordinate with heliports and hospitals
• The importance of community relations in urban flying
Settling Into New Rhythms
The transition is ongoing but stabilizing. We've identified reliable launch sites, established local testing protocols, and begun exploring Bay Area-specific projects.
The energy is different but potent: where the desert offered space for experimentation, the Bay Area offers density of talent, technology, and collaborative potential.
Looking Ahead: The 2026 Roadmap
2025 was foundational. 2026 will be about application, integration, and scaling.
Drone Operations Evolution
Beyond Piloting: Moving from flying drones to deploying aerial sensor platforms. Integrating multispectral cameras, LiDAR, and specialized payloads for environmental monitoring and infrastructure inspection.
Automation Expansion: Implementing more sophisticated autonomous missions, swarm behaviors for area coverage, and AI-assisted data analysis pipelines.
Network Scaling
Urban Mesh Challenges: Adapting desert-proven mesh techniques to dense urban environments with different propagation characteristics and interference profiles.
Cross-Platform Integration: Creating seamless interfaces between drone data collection and ground-based mesh networks for real-time field operations.
Content Development
Standing Zine Website: The big project for 2026—building out the permanent digital magazine space that emerged from our 4-issue experiment. This will be our primary technical documentation and storytelling platform.
Documentation Systems: Developing better systems for capturing technical processes so they can be shared more effectively across platforms.
Community & Collaboration
Bay Area Integration: Connecting with local makers, researchers, and operators. The density of technical talent here offers collaboration opportunities that simply didn't exist in the desert.
Open Source Contributions: Planning to release more of our tools, configurations, and findings back to the communities that helped us learn.
The Core Thesis Remains: Technology isn't abstract—it exists in physical space, governed by physics, regulated by society, and most powerful when integrated into coherent systems. 2026 will be about building those systems.
Looking back, 2025 wasn't about three separate projects (drones, mesh, relocation). It was about one continuous exploration of systems in physical space.
The Vertical Dimension
Drones taught us about operating in three-dimensional space—managing energy, navigating obstacles, and returning data from perspectives we can't physically occupy.
The Horizontal Dimension
Mesh networks taught us about covering area—propagation patterns, node density, and creating resilient communication fabrics across landscapes.
The Regulatory Dimension
Relocation taught us that physical space has legal and social layers—airspace classes, community concerns, and the art of operating respectfully in shared environments.
The Navigator's Mindset
The through-line of 2025 was developing what we call "the navigator's mindset": the ability to move through physical, technical, and regulatory space simultaneously. To understand that a drone flight isn't just about stick skills, it's about battery chemistry, radio propagation, airspace regulations, and community perception all at once.
This mindset will define our 2026. Not "drones" or "mesh" or "San Francisco" as separate categories, but as interconnected elements in the larger project of understanding—and operating effectively in—complex systems.
The Publishing Evolution
Perhaps most importantly, 2025 taught us about mediums. The 4 magazine issues were excelent prototypes. Through them, we discovered that what we really wanted to build was a "standing zine website": a permanent, evolving, interconnected digital space where our technical explorations could live, link to each other, and grow over time. This website you're reading now is the first manifestation of that vision.
Here's to the lessons of 2025 and the systems we'll build in 2026.
— The Wind & Wireless Team, December 26, 2025