Tell me about Meshtastic, MeshCore, & LoRa (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 9/23/2025 12:23:56 PM EDT
| Good for emergencies? Dependent on repeaters? Cellphone messaging apps connect via Bluetooth or USB to a device, or you must use a separate device w/ keyboard & screen? Repeaters are expensive or you just put a device w/ power up in a tree, on a building or on a tower? How is the encryption? |
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Originally Posted By 3one5: I have a pile of different Meshtastic radios, however I've found them all to be fairly unreliable. Using 3 different brands I've had hardware failures and software failures. At this point, it's nothing but a toy. https://store.rokland.com/products/wismesh-pocket I've heard their products are good. I haven't purchased yet but I've been considering it. |
| Agree, mostly not serious business. If you don't set it up and use it regularly it especially won't work for emergencies. I'd lean heavily more towards GMRS and repeaters or ham. The encryption probably works but so what, the messages are iffy and the hardware sucks generally. |
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Originally Posted By Greenspan: Agree, mostly not serious business. If you don't set it up and use it regularly it especially won't work for emergencies. I'd lean heavily more towards GMRS and repeaters or ham. The encryption probably works but so what, the messages are iffy and the hardware sucks generally. I expect being dependent on other nodes being present, if you're in a low-adoption area, it's probably not going to work well. I have an opportunity to install a couple of repeaters, one tens of feet, one hundreds, and other than the initial cost of the units, no further setup is seemingly required? |
I sell firearms produced by the finest child labor in the world, be it Filipino, Muslim, Mormon, Arizonan, or Texan.
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Originally Posted By jaqufrost: Have you used any from ROKland? https://store.rokland.com/products/wismesh-pocket I've heard their products are good. I haven't purchased yet but I've been considering it. Yes, I was super hopeful that they would be better and for the most part they've had less problems than some of the others. I have two of them sitting on my desk, one up on the roof and one in my truck. They regularly completely forget their settings and I have to reconfigure them. It's annoying, I was hopeful this would all be something pretty cool. |
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Originally Posted By 3one5: Yes, I was super hopeful that they would be better and for the most part they've had less problems than some of the others. I have two of them sitting on my desk, one up on the roof and one in my truck. They regularly completely forget their settings and I have to reconfigure them. It's annoying, I was hopeful this would all be something pretty cool. Originally Posted By 3one5: Originally Posted By jaqufrost: Have you used any from ROKland? https://store.rokland.com/products/wismesh-pocket I've heard their products are good. I haven't purchased yet but I've been considering it. Yes, I was super hopeful that they would be better and for the most part they've had less problems than some of the others. I have two of them sitting on my desk, one up on the roof and one in my truck. They regularly completely forget their settings and I have to reconfigure them. It's annoying, I was hopeful this would all be something pretty cool. Well, that's disappointing. So, interesting idea, not practical at this time? |
I sell firearms produced by the finest child labor in the world, be it Filipino, Muslim, Mormon, Arizonan, or Texan.
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neat, the tech is getting better it looks like. Sounds like a fun project. I was a little familiar with LoraWan smart building / battery operated outdoor sensors, LoRa/Lorawan was limited in data Tx size, suitable for sending room temp numbers but not much more for that particular application (smart building monitoring). the star/mesh receivers (5) within a couple square miles worked well for building penetration in most spots, but line of site between comm devices let it reach out longer distances. (7 miles IIRC) 915 mhz band US? 900-990? I see there's a Semtech LoraConnect 1276 which can 137-1020Mhz with a bitrate of upto? 37kbps. https://www.semtech.com/products/wireless-rf/lora-connect/sx1276#:~:text=Diagrams-,Overview,interference%20immunity%20and%20energy%20consumption. |
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Originally Posted By Bounce19712: 915 mhz band US? 900-990? 902-928, ISM (and amateur...) in the US. Most of that is mobile phone spectrum in other parts of the world. It's also used for gov/mil radar and some other mil applications. |
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This is a disappointing thread to have found. I got excited about the technology and bought a Heltec V3. Despite various online maps and forums showing dozens of active nodes in my area, I have found precisely zero, including several hours-long drives around town where other nodes were specifically listed to be present. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong as far as configuration goes. I've looked at all the online guides and youtube videos about common misconfigurations, and as near as I can tell I'm good. I have a second one on order just to see if I can get them to see each other. Sad to hear that the hardware and software seem not ready for prime-time. S2 speaks quite highly of the technology and I was looking forward to using them with family and friends for hiking, hunting, and camping. |
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Everyone always seems to focus on the tool, rather than focusing on who has the same tools. Tin cans and a string, Star Trek communicators, or anything in between, it makes little difference if there is nobody else using the same communications devices as you are. Meshtastic, LoRa, etc. can be useful if everyone in your neighborhood has one, knows how to use it, has a way to keep it charged up/powered up, and keeps it on 24/7/365 so that the ad hoc, mesh network actually works. The chances of that are probably worse than winning the lottery. I keep a box of cheap radios (plain old radios, not mesh-whatever) all programmed the same way, all USB chargeable. If the S ever HTF's then I can hand them out to neighbors. You could do the same with mesh-whatever radios, if you like. Get them all working and tested, then keep them ready in case of an emergency. |
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What caught my attention was basically extending your TCP/IP network out much futher than wifi will reach. Basically set up a lora node connected to starlink in your vehicle, then go hiking with your ip based LORA radio, which in turn provides a low power local wifi network for your personal devices, such as your cellular phone. Sure... two devices and all that. And the bandwidth is slower but still enough for text messaging and basic web browsing, or even lower resolution youtube. As I understand it the bandwidth will dynamically switch as signal strength increases / decreases. Add in the occasional battery powered node you could drop along the way... There was another thread on the subject here where some posts appeared to be from the guy developing the MorosX. But i may have read the tea leaves wrong. To be honest until i came across the above I didn't really understand the attraction many had with it. But... thinking of it as a long range low power IP network which can gateway to high speed IP network and that's pretty cool. .... it's useful in ways Amateur Radio over VHF/UHF cannot be, due to legal limitations on encryption / use. I'll admit i'm a little bit lost on using them for voice communication. Being as you can basically think of them as a sort of "wifi router" it's not as if you can just plug a PTT into the thing and expect to send/receive voice. I'm guessing on the back end it's essentially multicast packets to the network, which would require some sort of *other* device to run an application to encode/decode the audio to/from ip packets. Configuring a "channel" would be subscribing to "open the squelch" when a specific device sends voice packets over the network. Maybe? I don't really know. The MorosX site assumes a certain level of knowledge with the stuff which I do not have. ETA: found it. Archived though. https://www.ar15.com/forums/Outdoors/Let-s-talking-about-portable-IP-Mesh-Radios/22-708509/ ETA2: Apparently I am conflating different technologies / protocols. LoRaWAN and Wi-Fi HaLow are both long-range wireless IoT technologies that operate in different ways. LoRaWAN is optimized for very low power and long-range, low-data applications, while Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) provides higher data throughput, lower latency, and IP-based networking, making it better for more complex IoT applications that require more data, like security cameras. This video explains the applications of Wi-Fi HaLow for IoT: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WHjohSwTEE&t=87s[/youtube] ipXchange YouTube • Jun 18, 2025 LoRaWAN Best for: Applications with minimal data requirements that need extremely long-range communication and very low power consumption (e.g., 5+ year battery life). Data rate: Typically 0.3–50 kbps. Use cases: Environmental sensors (air/water quality), smart agriculture, smart streetlights, and asset tracking. Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) Best for: Applications needing higher data rates, lower latency, and more robust security, such as industrial automation or real-time video streaming. Data rate: Up to 347 Mbps. Use cases: Wireless security cameras, industrial IoT, and high-bandwidth sensor applications that require an IP-native network. Key differences Data throughput: Wi-Fi HaLow is significantly faster, enabling applications like video streaming that are not possible with LoRaWAN. Latency: HaLow is better for applications that require real-time communication due to its lower latency. Power consumption: LoRaWAN is generally more power-efficient for simple data packets, while HaLow's power consumption is a trade-off for its higher performance. Networking: HaLow provides an IP-native network, similar to traditional Wi-Fi, allowing for standard internet protocols to be used. LoRaWAN has a different network architecture. You can watch this video to learn how Wi-Fi HaLow can be used for long-distance communication:  You’ve Never Seen Wi-Fi Go This Far  I Built a $20,000 Military Router for $106.23 |
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Originally Posted By backbencher: Is there enough bandwidth to carry voice on this? I thought this was a store & forward messaging scheme. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10572210 |
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Originally Posted By aa777888-2: Everyone always seems to focus on the tool, rather than focusing on who has the same tools. Tin cans and a string, Star Trek communicators, or anything in between, it makes little difference if there is nobody else using the same communications devices as you are. Meshtastic, LoRa, etc. can be useful if everyone in your neighborhood has one, knows how to use it, has a way to keep it charged up/powered up, and keeps it on 24/7/365 so that the ad hoc, mesh network actually works. The chances of that are probably worse than winning the lottery. I keep a box of cheap radios (plain old radios, not mesh-whatever) all programmed the same way, all USB chargeable. If the S ever HTF's then I can hand them out to neighbors. You could do the same with mesh-whatever radios, if you like. Get them all working and tested, then keep them ready in case of an emergency. 
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Originally Posted By CashOnlyLargeBills: Originally Posted By backbencher: Is there enough bandwidth to carry voice on this? I thought this was a store & forward messaging scheme. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10572210 So very experimental, not a semi-consumer grade product available. |
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Originally Posted By backbencher: Is there enough bandwidth to carry voice on this? I thought this was a store & forward messaging scheme. No voice. LoRa is a very low bit-rate and isn't suitable for much more than very small data messages (text, position, etc). I've done some LoRa development just to learn. There are a pile of encoding options designed for different ranges and speeds, and some of the supported data rates are measured in bits-per-second. Not kilobits, megabits, or gigabits...just bits... The highest data rate is something like 20 Kbps, and only at extremely short ranges. Still not suitable for voice. My metropolitan area has a pretty good mesh (~200 nodes and a few relays in very good places). But I lost access to it with my last move, which was only 2 miles. I can occasionally see a few nodes, and I get no acks when I send test transmissions, and this is with a really nice antenna. It's so dependent on having line-of-sight that in some places it just doesn't work. I want to get a Yagi and point it at the city and see if that helps me re-join, but I don't have high hopes. |
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For me, ammo for the neighbors is a couple boxes of 25 ACP. A ham friend called me last week and he said some guys are wanting to put Meshtastic nodes at all the ham repeater sites. He had no details, but he has 4 good repeater sites that they want to populate. There are 900 mhz repeaters at two sites. I know the transmitters are at 927 mhz but don't get much use. |
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Originally Posted By backbencher: So very experimental, not a semi-consumer grade product available. Originally Posted By backbencher: Originally Posted By CashOnlyLargeBills: Originally Posted By backbencher: Is there enough bandwidth to carry voice on this? I thought this was a store & forward messaging scheme. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10572210 So very experimental, not a semi-consumer grade product available. Well… yes and no. LoRaWAN isn’t the right choice for voice. Not its use case. Informational pings. Plain text messages. IoT type stuff. And especially IoT type stuff at long ranges and VERY low power requirements. See my post above for tech that fits between LoRaWAN and “standard” WiFi. For an example of a “commercial” use case, victron sells a LoRaWAN module to enable remote monitoring and control of their devices by utilizing any public node that gateways to the Internet. |
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Originally Posted By CashOnlyLargeBills: I have found the WinLink service to be very reliable. I bought 4 LoRa Meshtastic boards a few years ago. Played around with it for awhile. Now they sit in a misc box of radio crap. Ya gotta spread them out to friends or places you have access too. Office, parking garage, random dominos roof with solar panel dropped by drone. |
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Originally Posted By JBFJ40: Ya gotta spread them out to friends or places you have access too. Office, parking garage, random dominos roof with solar panel dropped by drone. Originally Posted By JBFJ40: Originally Posted By CashOnlyLargeBills: I have found the WinLink service to be very reliable. I bought 4 LoRa Meshtastic boards a few years ago. Played around with it for awhile. Now they sit in a misc box of radio crap. Ya gotta spread them out to friends or places you have access too. Office, parking garage, random dominos roof with solar panel dropped by drone. A solar powered drone w/ helium balloon attached would give good coverage. |
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New video from Josh. Relevant to the thread. Best LoRa Meshtastic Devices Of 2026 |
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Originally Posted By backbencher: Is there enough bandwidth to carry voice on this? I thought this was a store & forward messaging scheme. Well that depends on what you mean by "this"? LoRa - Short for long range is a physical proprietary radio communication technique based on spread spectrum modulation. In ham terms it's the radio that does the modulation into AM/FM/SSB. It has a variety of speeds but they're all slow by any data standards we have today. (0.3 kbit/s and 27 kbit/s total throughput) They're specifically designed to work well into the noise floor. They have a link budget of 155 dB to 170 dB. At 27 kbps you could probably do voice if you forgo all the network overhead like connection/session and treated it like an analog radio. I've never seen any implementation that did that but it's probably possible. LoRaWan - A way to leverage LoRa radios to move data. Mostly used for fleet tracking/farm tracking/IoT type things. Meshtastic - Is a tech like LoRaWan that leverages LoRa radio to do something. Mostly it's near real-time chat/location with devices that are close range. Hops are typically limited to 3-7, because it's setup for instant or near instant comms. It's designed for people at a concert to communicate where there are thousands of devices, or bouncing across a few nodes to connect people in different buildings in a city, or communicating across a large farm where you can deploy router nodes. Meshcore - Is like Meshtastic with a different use case. It's supposed to a more durable connection, with a less frequent update. It's targeting a large quantity of fixed nodes, covering a much larger geographic region. The network connections are much less frequent than Meshtastic but you can get up to 60 hops. Ideally you join a Meshcore network and your node collects information on which devices/users are connected via which hops, somewhat like the old RIP routing that went out of style in the 90s. Once it builds it's network map, if you send your dad a message and he's 3 hops away, it sends the message with routing information so it only takes the 3 hops. The other nodes ignore it. So initially chatty, but then efficient after a short time. Riticulum - (From their description page) "Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth." It's a network stack you can add to something else to get mesh networking over LoRa hardware. So if you got a Raspberry Pi with a LoRa radio you could install the Riticulum network stack to talk to another Raspberry Pi with the same hardware, over a long distance. This is probably your best chance for a turn-key option to do voice. You may be able to get Asterisk to run over that link at max bandwidth. |
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Meshtastic has worked well in my testing. The ATAK plugin also works well, expect the voice ptt, which sucks (mentioned above, lora not good for voice). I am hoping for further movement in HaloW 915Mhz Wifi boards. I built my own meshtastic units with metal cases, as the 3D printed ones are janky. The R1 Neo I bought feels sturdy enough. |
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Originally Posted By 3one5: I have a pile of different Meshtastic radios, however I've found them all to be fairly unreliable. Using 3 different brands I've had hardware failures and software failures. At this point, it's nothing but a toy. This has been my experience as well. It's unfortunate because it could be pretty great. I'm now playing with a pile of different radios using an Android device to see if it's any better. |
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Originally Posted By jaqufrost: Have you used any from ROKland? https://store.rokland.com/products/wismesh-pocket I've heard their products are good. I haven't purchased yet but I've been considering it. Every brand I have has had issues losing config etc. In the beginning I had plans on putting solar nodes up in various high and hard to reach locations. However, if they can't hold the config they're pretty much useless. |
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Originally Posted By 3one5: Yes, I was super hopeful that they would be better and for the most part they've had less problems than some of the others. I have two of them sitting on my desk, one up on the roof and one in my truck. They regularly completely forget their settings and I have to reconfigure them. It's annoying, I was hopeful this would all be something pretty cool. Glad I'm not the only one seeing the exact same problems. |
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Originally Posted By WillieTangoFox: Meshtastic has worked well in my testing. The ATAK plugin also works well, expect the voice ptt, which sucks (mentioned above, lora not good for voice). I am hoping for further movement in HaloW 915Mhz Wifi boards. I built my own meshtastic units with metal cases, as the 3D printed ones are janky. The R1 Neo I bought feels sturdy enough. Halo is what I intend to play with next. I can pair it with the Starlink mini on my truck. |
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Originally Posted By WillieTangoFox: I am hoping for further movement in HaloW 915Mhz Wifi boards. Originally Posted By WillieTangoFox: I am hoping for further movement in HaloW 915Mhz Wifi boards. Originally Posted By 3one5: Halo is what I intend to play with next. I can pair it with the Starlink mini on my truck. I have a couple of the Heltec HaLow dongles. They just released version 2. Version 1 was 21dBm, version 2 is 27dBm. I believe 30dBm is the limit on ISM without leveraging your ham license, costing you encryption. I had hoped to extend my home network to a local park that is almost exactly 1 mile from my back door, the way the crow flies. I haven't been able to get out and test that link but around my house, anything line of site connects without issue at maximum bandwidth. The dongles can be connected to your network via WiFi or ethernet. I have the access point dongle connected via ethernet and my client dongle providing WiFi for my phone and tablet to connect to. My only complaint is there's very little feedback to tell you if the HaLow dongles are connected or not. There's an LED on each dongle but it doesn't change state immediately. If you're in a moving car, and it's constantly connecting and disconnecting, you may never know. The best situation is you go somewhere to setup the access point dongle where you get a connection, and then don't touch it. I wish they'd included some sort of mount provision. I've been using silicone wire ties to lash it to things so it doesn't move. You just have to make sure you have a USB-C cable long enough to reach where ever you put it. TheCommsChannel just released a couple of good videos on MeshCore too. Well worth the watch to see how much different it is from Meshtastic.  There's a newcomer to the Mesh world  Why we're switching from Meshtastic to MeshCore |
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I ordered some different hardware and have been playing with Meshtastic the last few days. ... i think it's a pretty good solution for a very low power and reasonable distance "maintain contact with my vehicle" when in the outdoors. I'll prob keep a node configured in my vehicle as well as a couple to hand out as "trackers" for guests (lollollol yea right) who might be along. One thing i wasn't expecting. The firmware is very much "these are the features you get." Not arduino-ish "here is the basic framework now you can build on top of it." With meshtastic you can configure each node in a variety of roles. "detection sensor" for example allows you to configure a GPI pins on the board as on/off there was some state change on this sensor so notify the network" type of function. Meshtastic firmware is already configured to work with serveral breakout boards for reading things like temperature, humidity, etc and then passing it along. Don't expect to be building your arduino sketches using the Arduino IDE. Meshtastic is built with PlatformIO which is far more powerful but more complex to use than Arduino IDE. I didn't know it was a thing until playing with Meshtastic. If you want to do your own custom things directly on your Arduinoesque meshtastic board you'll be forking the Meshtastic github and building your own non-supported version using PlatformIO. For example; Meshtastic firmware has a built-in ability to be a gate sensor via a digital (on/off) pin. But not a gate controller. And adding the logic to it much less a remote-control ability will require some exporation into programming with the casual Arduino hobbyist may not have dealt with before. At least i hadn't / haven't. What you can do is put another Arduino right next to the Meshtastic node and then run your Arduino IDE sketches there, communicating with the Meshtastic node over two wire serial to handle the radio messaging part. Which frankly - may be a better way to do things than otherwise. Mine all seem to reliably communicate with each other - when in a fairly short range here in the piney forest of North Carolina. Meshtastic has an in-built way to gate RF messages over the net using MQTT. You can think of this as analagous to an Amateur Radio operator igating where Node : mqtt :: Amateur iGate : APRS.fi. If i configure a meshtastic node to gate to MQTT I get US-wide nodes and messages, but only on that node. It doesn't appear to repeat over the local RF despite being set to do so. But it's possible i have something misconfigured elsewhere. Possibly in the channel details. All in all it's a fairly inexpensive way to spend a couple days learning about something new. Utility of it... you'll have to decide for yourself. With not a lot of money you can get decent range, encrypted communications. Which gives it a leg up over Amateur for local non-voice info sharing type nets, in my opinion. |
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Originally Posted By K9-Bob: So is Meshtastic a solution looking for a problem or a useful tool? Subjective. From a "i'm a casual user" pov. If you enjoy Amateur Radio as a sort of public chatroom and are content or prefer the open nature of it - possibly you aren't going to see a point to Meshtastic. If you're frustrated at the artificial limitations of Amateur Radio or GMRS around the legal issues with encrypted communications, you may find Meshtastic fits a solid niche for you. For a more apples to apples pro/con, the advantage APRS has over Meshtastic is power and digipeaters / iGates, particularly in sparsely populated areas. For "location and ad-hoc messaging-net" features, Meshtastic has more to offer with ease of use, encryption, and relatively "open" licensing. I don't see them as competing. More complementary. Amateur or GMRS for voice. Meshtastic for location / text / small data. From a "maker and tinkerer and programmer" pov. If you enjoy tinkering with Arduino projects and the idea of a wide area radio network opens up possibilities for your own personal projects - it's a pre-built way to do that on top of LoRA. |
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Originally Posted By TinLeg: With meshtastic you can configure each node in a variety of roles. "detection sensor" for example allows you to configure a GPI pins on the board as on/off there was some state change on this sensor so notify the network" type of function. Meshtastic firmware is already configured to work with serveral breakout boards for reading things like temperature, humidity, etc and then passing it along. You can us Meshtastic beyond text communication and location sharing, but I don't know why you would. You're stuck within the confines of a platform designed around chat. There are a ton of options for LoRa dev boards, and plenty of libraries that will let you setup point-to-point communication like Zigbee, or create meshes like Meshtastic, tailored to your project needs. ChatGPT and Gemini are both very capable of giving you code to do just about whatever you want. If you choose carefully you can get a board that is compatible with the Arduino IDE, if that's your thing. Originally Posted By K9-Bob: So is Meshtastic a solution looking for a problem or a useful tool? Meshtastic is very useful for text chat and location sharing over distances you can walk. Think of a large multistage music festival, Disney World, or camping/hiking. Both parties need a device and a way to interact with the device, and it's best if someone has setup a device to act as a repeater on high ground but it's not required. It's tolerant of mesh nodes moving around but is limited by total hops being limited to 3-7. If you want communication between cities or even across states, with the same hardware, you should try Meshcore. It does most of the same thing as Meshtastic but it has more intelligent routing built around nodes that don't move. You put a node up and it can figure out a path to another use that's 60+ hops away. It's really good participating in established mesh networks that don't move but would be terrible walking around Disney World. |
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Originally Posted By LHD: You can us Meshtastic beyond text communication and location sharing, but I don't know why you would. You're stuck within the confines of a platform designed around chat. There are a ton of options for LoRa dev boards, and plenty of libraries that will let you setup point-to-point communication like Zigbee, or create meshes like Meshtastic, tailored to your project needs. ChatGPT and Gemini are both very capable of giving you code to do just about whatever you want. If you choose carefully you can get a board that is compatible with the Arduino IDE, if that's your thing. By using a meshtastic node for the communications side all the unique id, routing, relay / repeat, dedup, acks, encryption and key exchange, self-healing, etc is already done. That's a ton of stuff to re-engineer, even with AI help. |
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As a side note, people who enjoy the mapping/tracking/messaging of meshtastic, should check out the Btech app that links to the Btech UV Pro radios (ham or gmrs). The app now has offline map downloads, and uses APRS to track radios. Radios have bluetooth tnc to your device, and built in gps. Has a lot of cool features, like pushing location requests to individual radios. Higher power, and lower frequencies, probably would provide a better solution to ad hoc situations where people are wanting a small group solution, and not participate in a larger crowd shared network, which is the true power of meshtastic. It seems like most people want to use meshtastic in a manner that removes its key goal, contributing to a larger public network, being handcuffed by ISM band restrictions on frequ and power. |
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Originally Posted By WillieTangoFox: It seems like most people want to use meshtastic in a manner that removes its key goal, contributing to a larger public network, being handcuffed by ISM band restrictions on frequ and power. I didn't find anywhere in the docs that was stated as a key goal. Rather implications to the opposite, though not "official documentation." "to keep hiking buddies connected when cell service was unavailable.." And "The Meshtastic project initially focused on the original use-case of small private outdoor mesh networks, not the large public meshes that exist today." The 3-hop default and hard coded 7-hop limit appears a strong implication that "large networks" weren't / aren't really the Meshtastic use-case. But - a default "client" role Meshtastic node repeats all packets it receives, regardless of possessing the key for that channel. Thus anyone carrying a Meshtastic node is participating in the larger network around them unless they've specifically configured their node to disable repeating packets for not-favorite or unknown nodes. |
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Originally Posted By TinLeg: I didn't find anywhere in the docs that was stated as a key goal. Rather implications to the opposite, though not "official documentation." "to keep hiking buddies connected when cell service was unavailable.." And "The Meshtastic project initially focused on the original use-case of small private outdoor mesh networks, not the large public meshes that exist today." The 7-hop limitation itself appears a strong implication that "large networks" weren't / aren't really the Meshtastic use-case. But - a default "client" role Meshtastic node repeats all packets it receives, regardless of possessing the key for that channel. Thus anyone carrying a Meshtastic node is participating in the larger network around them unless they've specifically configured their node to disable repeating packets for not-favorite or unknown nodes. Originally Posted By TinLeg: Originally Posted By WillieTangoFox: It seems like most people want to use meshtastic in a manner that removes its key goal, contributing to a larger public network, being handcuffed by ISM band restrictions on frequ and power. I didn't find anywhere in the docs that was stated as a key goal. Rather implications to the opposite, though not "official documentation." "to keep hiking buddies connected when cell service was unavailable.." And "The Meshtastic project initially focused on the original use-case of small private outdoor mesh networks, not the large public meshes that exist today." The 7-hop limitation itself appears a strong implication that "large networks" weren't / aren't really the Meshtastic use-case. But - a default "client" role Meshtastic node repeats all packets it receives, regardless of possessing the key for that channel. Thus anyone carrying a Meshtastic node is participating in the larger network around them unless they've specifically configured their node to disable repeating packets for not-favorite or unknown nodes. The 7 hop limitation is to prevent network flooding of repeats. Hop limits is common in any flood routing. Let me restate my position since I was not clear. Meshtastic is a shitty simplex messenger, so using them with your "hiking buddies" is not going to work great. Maybe try yelling really load. Intentionally participating in providing more meshtastic coverage of a given area is worthwhile. |
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Originally Posted By LHD: You can us Meshtastic beyond text communication and location sharing, but I don't know why you would. You're stuck within the confines of a platform designed around chat. There are a ton of options for LoRa dev boards, and plenty of libraries that will let you setup point-to-point communication like Zigbee, or create meshes like Meshtastic, tailored to your project needs. ChatGPT and Gemini are both very capable of giving you code to do just about whatever you want. If you choose carefully you can get a board that is compatible with the Arduino IDE, if that's your thing. Meshtastic is very useful for text chat and location sharing over distances you can walk. Think of a large multistage music festival, Disney World, or camping/hiking. Both parties need a device and a way to interact with the device, and it's best if someone has setup a device to act as a repeater on high ground but it's not required. It's tolerant of mesh nodes moving around but is limited by total hops being limited to 3-7. If you want communication between cities or even across states, with the same hardware, you should try Meshcore. It does most of the same thing as Meshtastic but it has more intelligent routing built around nodes that don't move. You put a node up and it can figure out a path to another use that's 60+ hops away. It's really good participating in established mesh networks that don't move but would be terrible walking around Disney World. 60+ hops doesn’t meshcore have a 8 hop limit? |
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Originally Posted By TinLeg: By using a meshtastic node for the communications side all the unique id, routing, relay / repeat, dedup, acks, encryption and key exchange, self-healing, etc is already done. That's a ton of stuff to re-engineer, even with AI help. Originally Posted By TinLeg: By using a meshtastic node for the communications side all the unique id, routing, relay / repeat, dedup, acks, encryption and key exchange, self-healing, etc is already done. That's a ton of stuff to re-engineer, even with AI help. A member of my radio club claims LoRaMesher will handle all that for you and a vast majority of the code is dropped as a template by the Arduino IDE. About a year ago I saw a similar setup for AP/Client connections using LoRa hardware too. It was a full communication stack that ate anything you put on I^2C or SPI. The name of the software escapes me at the moment. I'll see if I can find it. If you want something more powerful than a microcontroller, Riticulum is installed by your package manager. Originally Posted By WillieTangoFox: Meshtastic is a shitty simplex messenger, so using them with your "hiking buddies" is not going to work great. Maybe try yelling really load. The local Izaak Walton gives nodes to scouts while they're camping. Keeps track of the kids and everyone running the event can poke through the menu to find the dots on the map. Originally Posted By smeeg: 60+ hops doesn’t meshcore have a 8 hop limit? Watch that first video I posted. |
| After playing with Meshtastic for years now and dealing with the headache of not actually being able to successfully message others over any distance and nodes losing their config, I switched to MeshCore. Thus far MeshCore is lightyears better. |
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Figured I'd drop in another update. I live out in a rural area so it's a bit more difficult to find enough other nodes to really reach out. However, even there I'm starting to pull in other repeaters. I'm reaching out to some local folks with higher locations to see if I can put up a node. Today I'm at my office along the Colorado Front Range. I configured a repeater this morning and started playing. I'm picking up a ton of other nodes and repeaters. I've successfully had conversations back and forth with someone 40+ miles away. This is much different compared to what I experienced with Meshtastic in the same areas even though there are far less nodes. So if you're frustrated with Meshtastic I'd highly recommend you flash your nodes with MeshCore. |
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Originally Posted By 3one5: Figured I'd drop in another update. I live out in a rural area so it's a bit more difficult to find enough other nodes to really reach out. However, even there I'm starting to pull in other repeaters. I'm reaching out to some local folks with higher locations to see if I can put up a node. Today I'm at my office along the Colorado Front Range. I configured a repeater this morning and started playing. I'm picking up a ton of other nodes and repeaters. I've successfully had conversations back and forth with someone 40+ miles away. This is much different compared to what I experienced with Meshtastic in the same areas even though there are far less nodes. So if you're frustrated with Meshtastic I'd highly recommend you flash your nodes with MeshCore. Would you be so kind as to describe the radio frequency technical details of your 40+ mile link? Antennas, tx power, Modulation type and bit rate, height above average terrain for both stations (this was a direct link?) Thank you. Rege |
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Originally Posted By Asheville-Hippy: Would you be so kind as to describe the radio frequency technical details of your 40+ mile link? Antennas, tx power, Modulation type and bit rate, height above average terrain for both stations (this was a direct link?) Thank you. Rege This was not a direct link and is running at 910 Mhz FM. I was using a Seeed Studio T-1000E credit card sized node. In my 2nd story office I have another node that's running 100 mW into a 8db gain antenna running as a repeater. There are then a large number of repeaters spotted all along the Front Range that the messages jumped across. It's really quite impressive! |