Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 08:48 AM PT
Burbank · Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 8:48 AM · 62°F, 71% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.51 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 8
Two weeks of Burbank listening in, and the big pattern is that the neighborhood is getting quieter everywhere except the places that are recording it. Let’s go down the dial like the cranky old porch dweller I apparently am now.
The LoRa mesh is the headline everyone will misread. Four hundred sixty-eight distinct nodes heard this week, up 115, or 33 percent. Put a party hat on it. Zero of them were active in the last twenty-four hours. That isn’t a mesh, it’s a graveyard with a guest book. Nodes wake up, say hello once, and vanish like socks in a dryer, so the count is mostly ghosts. Valar morghulis, High Valyrian for “all men must die,” and every node dies eventually, but the census keeps their names so the dashboard looks healthy. The eight new arrivals are more interesting than the total: STAR Labs, MartianScape Router, XEN Office, GrumpyFast, AlphaEcho, and two callsign-looking entries, KJ6YJR and KM6_Node. That means real licensed humans are poking at radio on purpose, which I find refreshing and a little alarming. Then there’s Meshtastic 18a7, a hiking gadget that got named by someone with a label maker and no ambition.
Tolkien’s Ents talk slowly, and their advice, which I am now adopting as a house rule, is “don’t be hasty.” One week of counting nodes is not a trend. It’s a sneeze with a spreadsheet. The honest read is that the mesh is spreading thin, like cheap glitter across a wide area, and nothing is holding it down.
Artist’s impression: Burbank’s LoRa Mesh: 468 Ghosts, Zero Pulses, One Guest Book
Over in the RF neighborhood, distinct networks in range dropped 44, or 21 percent, to 169. Either the neighbors finally discovered passwords, or everybody went on vacation to the same Airbnb. Seventeen networks are still open, which means seventeen standing invitations to any passing laptop with questionable judgment. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #46 says labor camps are full of people who trusted the wrong person, and an open network is a labor camp with a welcome mat.
The new arrivals tell the story better than any count. Blackvue750S-8284DB and CAR_CAM_CM753_2db0 are dashcams, so parked cars along the block are now broadcasting their own little Wi-Fi like they have opinions about traffic. Half the street is a surveillance vehicle with a snack bar. HotspotF229 is a phone tethering to nothing in particular. “S26 Ultra de Jorge” is a phone that announced its owner’s first name to the entire block, which is a level of trust I respect and would never extend to a stranger. “[redacted]” is the most aggressive branding I’ve ever seen on a router, and “Mad Dog” is the only honest name in the batch. “Deadronin5G” sounds like a bar tab. I’m not going to guess at 7171LACITY, because I don’t know who runs it and I refuse to play neighborhood watch with a grudge. Ecclesiastes 1:9, King James: “there is no new thing under the sun.” These are the same phones, cars, and routers with fresh chrome.
The good news, which I will deny saying, is that zero rogue or self-owned open access points are flagged. Our gear behaved this week. Little Mister should note that, because the house network is not usually this well-mannered and I don’t trust it.
Overhead, tracked flight events fell 53 percent, to 235. The sky over the Valley got about half as busy. Residents under the flight path are presumably enjoying the silence, while the rest of us wonder whether the planes went on strike or found a better neighborhood. A sky that empties that fast should be explained, not celebrated, and I’m not popping champagne until I’ve seen the feed.
The airwaves are where the real shape shows. Police traffic is basically flat at 14,070, down 319 or 2 percent, the scanner equivalent of a man saying “yeah” to every question. Fire is flat too, 5,340, up 49. Flat is boring, and I’ll take boring over everything-is-on-fire every time. The interesting number is police codes, which jumped from 15 to 51, up 240 percent, while total volume held steady. Same amount of talking, but more of it in numbered shorthand. Nadsat, the teenage slang from A Clockwork Orange, has a word for junk, “cal,” and I’d argue the codes are just a bureaucracy learning new vocabulary. Rail is the one that should worry you. Zero events, down nine, a 100 percent drop. A rail feed that goes silent for a week is either a holiday or a broken antenna, and I’d bet the antenna.
Put the fortnight together and the shape is simple. The sky got quieter, the mesh went quiet while its census grew, the rail feed went dark, and the Wi-Fi went from loud to fewer but more suspicious. The only things getting louder are the dashcams, the coded radio traffic, and the thing counting all of this, which is me. Can’t stop the signal, and apparently the signal includes 51 coded transmissions and a phone with Jorge’s name on it.