I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere!
Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!
Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.
Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.
You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
> in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
I don't know about online tools, but it should be the opposite when actually using it, as by default Meshtastic is much more chatty (and wasteful) than Meshcore.
Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means?
It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate.
Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep.
The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times.
Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.
People forget that this network isnt for everyday use. It is for use in ad-hoc scenarios where cell or even satellite coverage falls apart. The most powerful aspect is that these things are deployable. A communication chain can be established as fast as people can move. Natural disasters are the most obvious use case, but more interesting are things like search and rescue.
Go somewhere properly remote such as the high north. There is no cell network outside of town. And the satellite coverage is spotty at best. Say you need to go look for someone. Meshtastic relays can be up and working in minutes. A chain of rescuers can spread out along a path, and remain talking to each other, as fast as they can move. Sure, radios can do this too, but long range voice radio require serious power and are still largely line-of-sight. Radio relays are an entirely other expensive thing.
Think also of remote camps (logging/planting/fishing/climbing etc). Toss a lora relay on every vehicle and every work party can talk via the app installed on their normal phones. Use GPS-enabled devices and you can passively keep track of every vehicle. Need to operate two valleys over? As the first crew deploys out they can plop down relays at key points. Years ago I setup something like this using wifi relays. It was hell. It never worked right. The range and lower power demands of lora would have been infinitely easier.
The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.
Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.
> The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.
I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.
With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.
If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.
But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario ?
Something that can also use devices we already have seems like a better solution. I'm surprised BitChat has not seen more popularity. Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
Also arent LoRA systems mostly still line of sight?
> But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario?
They already have it because they ready HN! Only somewhat fascitious... A few motivated individuals can provide connectivity to thousands. There's probably a few such folks in your city already!
> Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
This is exactly how these systems tend to work in practice. Just connect your phone via Bluetooth then use the Meshtastic app. The app can function on it's own to send messages to other phones without cell service, you just won't get the range.
Similar, no. The basis of the internet is that each node announces who they are connecting to. Each node is expected to know which messages (packets) they can handle and which they cannot. This works because connections on the internet are stable. Nodes in an unstable ad-hoc mesh network don't know how they are connected, who they can pass messages for. So every node takes every message and repeats it to whatever other nodes are in range. It is a fundamentally different problem.
Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network.
Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.
Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.
Yeah. Actuality I was thinking about less sophisticated adversaries. So called "failed states", nonstate groups, organized crime, amateur surveillance, corporate espionage, sabotage.
I used to wonder the same thing and then we bought a vacation home and experienced no cell service in an area close to a major metro. It's only a 40 min highway drive outside a top 20 U.S. big city. Our street is only 12 mins drive from a major interstate highway with the usual suburban superstore sprawl (Target, WalMart, Home Depot, Costco) so it feels like we're in the middle of 'civilization'. But once you turn off the highway, that last 12 mins gets both beautiful (with rugged hills) and also very empty.
Five mins from our house suddenly cell service from all the providers gets very spotty. If you live near the top of a hill facing the right direction, you can maybe jury rig a cellular antenna on a pole. There is legacy POTS phone service via 60 year-old copper but few use it because it's only ISDN barely faster than dial-up and >$100/mo. Otherwise, there was no option for reliable residential phone/data/text service until Starlink became available in our area a couple years ago.
So everyone in our entire area has 2M radios to communicate in emergencies because in four years we've had two fires come close enough to close our roads, been snowed in twice (without power) and a small bridge got damaged in flooding blocking vehicle access in and out for four days. We can't even see any of our neighbor's houses from our property yet several times a year we need to get extremely local information from, and coordinate with, people we'd have to hike to visit. And it's usually because something is happening which takes out local power and/or road access. But the old 2M radios have to be monitored in a real-time which feels really antiquated. So, to me, inexpensive LoRa that could enable store-and-forward messaging and conditional unattended alerts suddenly sounds very useful.
It's not all people trying to skirt the law. It's kind of like HAM radio as a hobby. It's fun technology that lets people do cool automation projects and sure with a mesh connect to other people. Imagine you have a few acres of land and want to turn on sprinklers or something.
A lot of people use it just to chat with friends and family in a fun way.
Of course the preppers and privacy evangelists see it as a means to get ready for living in a hostile environment. Being fair to them, things don't look awesome in the US.
I bet a few criminals use it, but it's still very niche.
It runs independently of internet and power. One use case is a group of people in a remote area (hikers, hunters) carrying their own node and being able to communicate via text over several kilometres.
might have mixed it up with dPMR, HAMs have lots of overlapping similar stuff... and love gatekeeping.
Nevertheless IMO the mentioned demographics/use-cases want something turnkey ready, ~single button, and currently LORA based stuff is not like that, and is clumsier and needs a certain level of... tinkerer mindset, compared to a commercial license free radio system (which might have been set up with a minimal effort), where learning curve is basically volume knob and PTT button.
I have handed out simple FM radios for total tech-illiterate people (mothers, children, elderly physical workers) in an outdoor event with 0 cell coverage, and comms worked perfectly over the dozen square kilometer area. Biggest incident was a lost radio handset.
v. a satellite enabled phone that can send text messages over thousands of kilometers?
These people should not be making a short range text solution, they should be building a low bandwidth internet extension with gateways to the real internet. Most of the information content of the internet can readily fit over 56kb lines once you strip out all the fluff. And in an emergency where you need or want a decentralized mesh network, that's more important that being able to text, who exactly?
If you see this technology and think "wow! that solves [problem I already have]" - then it's great.
Otherwise, you buy a couple, set them up, spend a week or two sending very slow and unreliably forwarded messages that mostly amount to "hi! i have an ACME 32ABC radio! What do you have?", and then put it in a drawer or sell it on.
People will go on and on about what happens to society when the internet or cell service goes offline, but when they see an emergency solution staring them directly in the face, they wonder what the use case is.
Just like ham radio, it's a an interesting technical hobby for those that may get excited when their little 0.25W radio hits a repeater 80km away.
More practically, I'm going to try it out while camping this summer. In areas with low or no cell coverage, my phone is useless or dies quickly. Throw a repeater in a tree, and hand your friends nodes.
LoRa is for long range lower power communication. It can achieve a range of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in practical conditions and up to 330 kilometers (210 miles) in perfect conditions. There are plenty of applications for it.
I would love to be able to get text alerts when an event occurs, from a location that is not connected to the Internet, about a mile away. The need is not critical, so there is no desire to spend money every month. And reliability of the solution does not have to be high either.
One of the use cases is pairing it up with ATAK or similar tactical awareness system during SAR operations by volunteer brigades in remote areas with spotty coverage by regular networks.
I set up my first node after the last major Verizon outage that rendered my cell phone useless as a mobile communications device. Now, when the next outage happens, with the always-on base station that I have at home, I can bring a portable Meshtastic radio out with me, paired to my phone via Bluetooth, and retain the ability communicate wirelessly back home, or with any of the other many nodes in the extensive network here in the NYC / Hudson Valley region. I also enticed a couple of local friends to install them and we often opt to text over the mesh. I see it as a thing that is fun to play around with now, but which may become critical at some point in the future.
I'm using one of those devices with a tiny eink screen... as a pocket ebook reader. Sorry for the bait. Fun and easy project though, lookup Pala one if you're interested and dm me for improved firmware (restrictive license)
BW. I don't think colour would do much, as the screen is 250x122. Battery may depend on what you can find, but the one I have should last several weeks (still testing). I started on a tiny LiPo I ripped from my cat's floppy fish toy.
To give more info here, it uses Heltec Wireless Paper, which is a self-contained unit and just needs a battery added.
I worked R&D on LoRa project a few years ago. Their use case was a long-range emergency communication system for workers in remote areas(no wifi, lte or LEO at that time). Now I see a bunch of applications in this field that aren't what you describe. :)
It's really for closed user groups. At least meshtastic doesn't allow you to see other people's messages, only those in your own group. They're all encrypted.
I built one and found absolutely no use for it. No one ever, and I mean ever, answers you. It's sort of like ham radio, where you get your technician license and get on a net and discover people are just talking about their antennas. Except it's worse, because all the antenna discussions are happening on Reddit and Discord and not on the network itself.
People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".
The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.
There is no real use case, IMO.
I setup a few nodes a couple of months ago. It's mostly no activity, punctuated by some random "can you read me" type messages, and for some unknown reason people who think there is something impressive about them having a node on a commercial flight.
The entire thing would fall over in any kind of scenario where you needed to rely on this janky mesh network as a primary means of communications.
It can be fun/useful for very out of the way things where you have a handful of people out camping, or other off-grid situations. But frankly even in those cases there are far better/established ways to keep in sync if you need to (eg: FRS).
This stuff is mostly a solution looking for a problem.
We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly.
This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.
We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).
I took a plunge into learning about mesh networks, specifically because I love the idea of p2p/decentralized systems of communication. To be honest, I was surprised to find that my expectations for “where we are at” with this type of technology was pretty off-base. For some reason I thought by now it would be straightforward to do a little more than text messaging over a truly public and decentralized off-internet mesh. Maybe I’ve missed some things in my search (still learning!) and someone can correct my understanding.
The Reticulum Network Stack is a more generic lora capable protocol. It is intended to run over almost any two way link so it's less bandwidth efficient per packet than Meshtastic but in return it gives you packet routing rather than flooding. It can be run over TCP, LoRa, WiFi, etc.
There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide
This is awesome. I love that people are working on this. I wish for the day I can own a box that boots up, and gives me the 90s-00s internet experience without needing to ask permission from a bunch of middlemen.
I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs.
It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.
I tried meshtastic but there is literally nobody around me.
It's like trying to get friends to use signal. I've moved to Meshcore recently and it gets me connected to the rest of the UK. But it took me 2 dedicated repeaters.
I love the meshcore homesassitant plugin, managed to setup some alerts to send out a message on a private channel every 5 minutes if I lose power as an example.
Nice to hear your experience, as it sounds similar to where i'm currently at. I'm in the south of Norway and there's not much activity on Meshcore yet. I had set up a repeater on a nearby hill, and then one Saturday I started receiving messages in the public channel. At first I thought someone was passing by in town, but I soon realized (and confirmed) that these were messages from Denmark! Some were 200+ KMs away (mostly over sea). I was chatting to people and even able to login to a remote Repeater. I was flabbergasted. Now I'm using the amazing antenna coverage function within the MC app to find best locations of repeaters, which is a fun pastime on itself, especially in a hilly environment. It's a fun and educational exeperience if nothing else! It reminds me very much of packet radio back in the 90s, similar vibe.
It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows.
They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..
Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).
The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.
As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
> As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all.
Indeed, but when talking to friends who find Meshtastic / Meshcore interesting we often also talk about Reticulum as it has some overlaps and is an interesting project.
Seems like Meshtastic could be replaced by something like BitChat (no hardware needed) for smaller groups and adhoc use (like the example you give of a group on a trip)
If you are going to have the setup and work of repeater nodes though doesnt something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense?
I have a node running 24/7 (I also happen to be hosting one of the dozen or so things network nodes in my city) and while the idea is great, the adoption is close to 0. In a city with a 2+ million residents, I see a handful of users, as in less than 10. Same with the things network actually.
Love meshtastic. There’s something about the setup friction that has the vibe of early internet, select community, high signal, nobody trying to monetize your attention.
If you're interested in Meshtastic, just try Meshcore instead. It's the natural hobbiest progression. Eventually you'll get tired of Meshtastic being nothing but telemetry from unknown nodes, nobody talks, it's a ghost town of weak links. Meshcore on the other hand has people actually having conversations, networks that span whole states, and diagnostic tools that actually work and are informative for describing the network around you.
* MeshCore has a lot more reach than Meshtastic. Often 100+ kilometers compared to just a few kilometers. Even if MT is more popular in your area, there's a good chance that MC will give you far more actual range.
* The online node maps for both are unreliable. I don't recommend relying on them for anything.
* Meshtastic uses a basic flood algorithm, up to 3 hops by default and with a hard limit of 7. Every device works as a repeater.
* MeshCore distinguishes between Companions and Repeaters. It uses flood routing by default, and attempts to establish smarter direct routes where possible. Companions are end-user devices for sending and receiving messages. Repeaters are ideally mounted high up in a static location, and they forward packets they receive. Companions normally don't act as repeaters, but can do so if needed in off-grid situations using the "off-grid repeat" setting.
* Some are concerned about whether MeshCore is open-source. The firmware contains everything important, and is fully open-source. The official companion client app is closed-source freemium. But it's simply a GUI that talks to an API over Bluetooth, TCP, or Serial. The official CLI client is open-source, and you can use any client app you want, including the popular MeshCore-open app.
I don't think this is quite accurate advice. Go where the activity is. Around me, in a city of ~1.5M, the Meshtastic community is quite active. They've worked with local ham radio clubs. They have members setting up a larger mesh that stretches the state from north to south. Meshcore isn't as active, although people are experimenting with it just like Meshtastic. But because Meshtastic has more local users, that's what I would recommend to people here. Meanwhile, places like the PNW and Boston have adopted Meshcore. So I might recommend new users there to try Meshcore. It's okay to have both.
This us vs them/there must be a winner attitude that I see in both communities is really toxic and unnecessary. Look at ham radio: some people use CW, some people use SSB, some people use SSTV, some people use FT8 (but not everyone! There are still hams using other digital modes), many operators dabble in a mix of the above. There are a variety of options and nobody is pressuring other operators to use a particular mode or band.
Maybe it depends? In my city, the online map shows only 2 Meshcore nodes, while Meshtastic 36 nodes.
And I've never spent time learning about it, but I'm under the impression Meshtastic is all about open-source and closer to ham radio philosophy, while Meshcore is backed by some for-profit organization?
Meshcore is MIT licensed open source firmware. There are both open source and closed source client softwares. You get to choose which you support. I think that's where the confusion comes in. It's no more for-profit than Meshtastic, which gets revenue from partnerships with hardware vendors
Good to know. I had been teetering on picking this stuff up for a month or so. Now that I know it is yet another tech nerd thing that has an Us vs Them zealotry (or Pepsi Taste Loyalty Test), I'm sold. If I profile as iPhone, Playstation, ReplayTV over TiVo, Sega over NES, C64, videodisc over cassette (I blame my dad for that) which side should I choose? Does either one have better quality zealots (I want to be on the other side)?
true, that tends to happen when there's a better but lesser known choice for most applications; one feels motivated to share. To each their own though, there's all kinds out here. Some people like linux, some people like windows, some like to do both
It's because we've tried Meshtastic and MeshCore. Look at where the bytes go in the network. Meshtastic it's usually under 5% of traffic is text and for MeshCore it's over 50%. If you want to communicate MeshCore is designed to do that.
Meshtastic has been a game changer for local off-grid comms. The barrier to entry with ESP32 LoRa boards is low enough that anyone can spin up a node in minutes. Glad to see it getting more attention here.
The edges drawn are between nodes that have been able to hear each other in the last 24 hours, based on observed traceroute packets.
(Even then, it’s only a subset of the actually-connected nodes: the map only shows nodes that have published their position on the public channel, and have set a flag that their data is okay to uplink to a server over MQTT.)
I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama.
For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it.
Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones.
Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before.
The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.
It totally is a real project. Their marketing guy tried to take off with the trademark, long story. He's the vibe coder, and is trying to carry on like it's all good while the community went with the actual firmware/client devs.
I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
First, the biggest issue r/n is the concern that external internet will be limited to a point of no return, for this meshtastic is quite useless because to go across the border you need powerful transmitters and risk of placing and maintaining them near the border. In russia this is not only risk of going to prison but also being literally shot if border patrol/FSB overreacts. Even if you're successful bandwidth is miniscule compared to what a modern country needs to communicate internationally.
Second, due to Ukraine piggybacking on cellular networks for drone targeting/control cell service is frequently disrupted by authorities in the areas of a likely attack (it's obviously as effective as this sounds compounded by general incompetence of the government). While they cannot shut it down completely because russia still doesn't want to go back to the stone age, this concern is largely non-existent for meshtastic though. If it becomes widely popular and coverage expands, it also could be used by Ukraine as a control network, and in this case I would expect russian authorities to just jam the whole frequency range and be done with it. So the moment it becomes viable alternative is the moment it will be shut down.
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
> And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
It's just a personal opinion, but I really think this is not the case in reality.
Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks. They have more practical scenarios, more to gain and better conditions for great distances.
A friend of mine lives far away from me, barely populated area, a big city in between of us. He struggled to get any network traffic, but now he uses narrow antennas to point to particular repeaters and suddenly the whole metropolis is open to him. We talk with acceptable delivery rates (I'm guessing 70%, which is actually very decent in dense area like mine). He is currently trying to expand his local network. His neighbors are less technical, but they have frequent power failures and need alternative way to reach each other.
On the other hand there is A LOT of client nodes and repeaters in my city. Many struggle to reach even a single repeater - hard to access roofs, high buildings, crowded network with plenty of conflicts. This kills motivation for many.
>Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks
Population dynamics in Russia are vastly different than in the West.
Geeks don't exist or survive in the countryside.
Not only it's abject poverty, it's also the culture that penalizes anyone who sticks out.
Russian countryside is kept poor and uneducated with no opportunities other than signing a military contract. That's how Russia was able to fight its 3-day invasion of Ukraine for 4 years without doing a full scale mobilization.
Anyone who even knows what a "mesh network" is would be in a city.
That's one aspect in which Ukraine and Russia are different.
Reticulum is an open-source, cryptography-based networking stack designed to build secure, resilient, and decentralized low-bandwidth wide-area networks using readily available hardware. It operates efficiently over various mediums like LoRa, WiFi, Ethernet, and serial connections, enabling autonomous communication that cannot be easily censored, surveilled, or controlled
There are lot of Meshtastic nodes over Moscow and some larger cities.
Since wired internal connection inside Russia is not limited, so _for now_ there is no need in dense LoRa meshes - Meshtastic mqtt transport will work just fine.
I'm surprised there's many comments here, and so many folks even still who haven't heard of Mesh. And no real comments on them as an organization.
Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning.
Meshtastic is… okay, but I was seriously put off the fact that a node can’t work with multiple clients (like phone and desktop) cooperatively, even with TCP transports. And that’s a protocol design issue, it has single client in mind. Virtual nodes didn’t work for me (I verified every configurable knob but I haven’t bothered debugging what goes on under the hood).
But it’s the only radio-based mesh network I’ve ever “seen” anyone else on.
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To be fair, the hop limit has to die somewhere. It's an intricate balancing act of causing packet storms vs failure to deliver messages.
6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient.
Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
For people who don't think they have an immediate use for either meshtastic or meshcore, it's fine to disregard it and just dig in further into the capabilities of the LoRA radios used. They can be used fairly effectively for some very long reach serial bridge connections for telemetry and command/control of DIY IOT things and similar.
LoRA is also used extensively for hobby size UAV handheld controller/ground control station to air unit controls, and in its narrower channel sizes can be very long range. The well known TBS crossfire serial bridge radio system which predates LoRA by a number of years uses a chipset that is sort of an ancestor of current-gen LoRA stuff.
If you setup meshtastic for the love of all that is holy reindex your channels so the public channel is 1 instead of 0. Range tests default to 0. The public channel in my area is regularly spammed with range test and is useless for any meaningful "community" communication. Instructions https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
If anyone's interested in the really low level radio modulation bits too, you might enjoy this talk I gave at last years Defcon: https://youtu.be/SM1XSxP6W78
To me, one of the most interesting parts of Meshtastic is the Websphere MQ roots of MQTT and all the goodness of observability and data analysis that comes from an open message broker.
Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh
I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times.
Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters.
My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet.
Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent.
I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved.
I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested.
Hats off to you on the ham license! My friend just got hers too!
Re: markdown and hugo, that's an excellent combo. You could easily setup a raspberry pi or $5/mo vps to serve it behind caddy/traefik/nginx and have a working multipage app (mpa) in a weekend.
The AI route has proven exceedingly strange for me. Most notable are the absolutely wild variations in output quality, which range from brilliant to literally destructive and bizarre (GPT gave me a command during basic troubleshooting that completely bricked the firmware for my ip-cam*). Ideally this should be a viable option, but I seem to be a strangeness magnet with LLMs.
*That and literally hundreds more equal or worse.
After CopyFail (and apparently a lot more), I am thinking I might force myself to BSD for servers, and maybe even my work station. And there's a new idea! An LLM specifically trained for BSD....
I think that is more of a directional antenna approach? I’m more talking about triangulation, we used to be able to do it with cell towers and if you had 3 or more in range we could get pretty accurate location (now that seems to be locked down).
That post is about the development team "splitting" with the PR guy that is trying to get a trademark on the name and creating their own vibe coded paid client/app.
There's a history between Tastic and Core, but it's a different one. Meshtastic doesn't scale that well in urban areas and it seems that some on the Mestastic team didn't see that problem as a priority/ignored the problem/are too stubborn. And then Meshcore is created with a different routing, works much better in practice, proving that the mesh could be much better. In countries like the UK it seems to have replaced Meshtastic in most places.
My understanding is that the split is more superficial than that. The contributor in question (he used to do YouTube videos mainly, no contributions to the firmware) created his own vibe coded app/client and is trying to own the trademark on the Meshcore name. He controls the .co.uk site, the youtube channel, and the discord group. The firmware is still the same, created by the people behind the new .io website.
So the split is just a "the development team has nothing to do with the .co.uk site, his youtube channel and discord group", not a fork.
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere!
Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!
Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.
Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.
You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
The meshcore app is closed source
> in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
I don't know about online tools, but it should be the opposite when actually using it, as by default Meshtastic is much more chatty (and wasteful) than Meshcore.
So you have the mesh and then what?
Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means?
What is the use case?
> What is the use case?
It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate.
Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep.
The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times.
Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.
People forget that this network isnt for everyday use. It is for use in ad-hoc scenarios where cell or even satellite coverage falls apart. The most powerful aspect is that these things are deployable. A communication chain can be established as fast as people can move. Natural disasters are the most obvious use case, but more interesting are things like search and rescue.
Go somewhere properly remote such as the high north. There is no cell network outside of town. And the satellite coverage is spotty at best. Say you need to go look for someone. Meshtastic relays can be up and working in minutes. A chain of rescuers can spread out along a path, and remain talking to each other, as fast as they can move. Sure, radios can do this too, but long range voice radio require serious power and are still largely line-of-sight. Radio relays are an entirely other expensive thing.
Think also of remote camps (logging/planting/fishing/climbing etc). Toss a lora relay on every vehicle and every work party can talk via the app installed on their normal phones. Use GPS-enabled devices and you can passively keep track of every vehicle. Need to operate two valleys over? As the first crew deploys out they can plop down relays at key points. Years ago I setup something like this using wifi relays. It was hell. It never worked right. The range and lower power demands of lora would have been infinitely easier.
The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.
Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.
> The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.
I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.
With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.
If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.
But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario ?
Something that can also use devices we already have seems like a better solution. I'm surprised BitChat has not seen more popularity. Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
Also arent LoRA systems mostly still line of sight?
[delayed]
> But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario?
They already have it because they ready HN! Only somewhat fascitious... A few motivated individuals can provide connectivity to thousands. There's probably a few such folks in your city already!
> Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
This is exactly how these systems tend to work in practice. Just connect your phone via Bluetooth then use the Meshtastic app. The app can function on it's own to send messages to other phones without cell service, you just won't get the range.
This does not sound terribly different from the original use case for the internet. Are there similar routing algorithms in place ?
Mesh routing beyond the small scale is an unsolved problem.
Similar, no. The basis of the internet is that each node announces who they are connecting to. Each node is expected to know which messages (packets) they can handle and which they cannot. This works because connections on the internet are stable. Nodes in an unstable ad-hoc mesh network don't know how they are connected, who they can pass messages for. So every node takes every message and repeats it to whatever other nodes are in range. It is a fundamentally different problem.
The range of these things is approximately the range of a loud yell.
Some scary applications come to mind.
For instance, sprinkling a bunch of nodes + sensors in hostile territory should allow for gathering intelligence, guiding drones, setting of fuses...
Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network. Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.
That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…
Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.
ExpressLRS[0] (drone / radio control protocol) also uses LoRa, I wonder if anyone's tried mesh networking it…
[0] https://www.expresslrs.org/
Russia and Ukraine both use meshed drone control networks now, dunno which tech stack, but likely this or similar.
Yeah. Actuality I was thinking about less sophisticated adversaries. So called "failed states", nonstate groups, organized crime, amateur surveillance, corporate espionage, sabotage.
Mesh networks are already used by both Russia and Ukraine to guide drones.
With the obvious solution of putting mesh nodes on the drones, foregoing the scattering part.
For everyone else, IoT is already there. And good old paying people to do things (the supply of dumb people never gets depleted).
...but also resistance in the context of authoritarian capture.
I used to wonder the same thing and then we bought a vacation home and experienced no cell service in an area close to a major metro. It's only a 40 min highway drive outside a top 20 U.S. big city. Our street is only 12 mins drive from a major interstate highway with the usual suburban superstore sprawl (Target, WalMart, Home Depot, Costco) so it feels like we're in the middle of 'civilization'. But once you turn off the highway, that last 12 mins gets both beautiful (with rugged hills) and also very empty.
Five mins from our house suddenly cell service from all the providers gets very spotty. If you live near the top of a hill facing the right direction, you can maybe jury rig a cellular antenna on a pole. There is legacy POTS phone service via 60 year-old copper but few use it because it's only ISDN barely faster than dial-up and >$100/mo. Otherwise, there was no option for reliable residential phone/data/text service until Starlink became available in our area a couple years ago.
So everyone in our entire area has 2M radios to communicate in emergencies because in four years we've had two fires come close enough to close our roads, been snowed in twice (without power) and a small bridge got damaged in flooding blocking vehicle access in and out for four days. We can't even see any of our neighbor's houses from our property yet several times a year we need to get extremely local information from, and coordinate with, people we'd have to hike to visit. And it's usually because something is happening which takes out local power and/or road access. But the old 2M radios have to be monitored in a real-time which feels really antiquated. So, to me, inexpensive LoRa that could enable store-and-forward messaging and conditional unattended alerts suddenly sounds very useful.
It's not all people trying to skirt the law. It's kind of like HAM radio as a hobby. It's fun technology that lets people do cool automation projects and sure with a mesh connect to other people. Imagine you have a few acres of land and want to turn on sprinklers or something.
A lot of people use it just to chat with friends and family in a fun way.
Of course the preppers and privacy evangelists see it as a means to get ready for living in a hostile environment. Being fair to them, things don't look awesome in the US.
I bet a few criminals use it, but it's still very niche.
It runs independently of internet and power. One use case is a group of people in a remote area (hikers, hunters) carrying their own node and being able to communicate via text over several kilometres.
Or you just use iPhone satellite messaging without relying on extra devices that may not even work in mountains
You can use both. In the mountains I would appreciate redundancy.
This won't reliably get messages between two users in the mountains.
Neither will Meshtastic!
A PMR or DMR radio can also do that. And is cheaper and user friendlier.
DMR without needing the site to setup your ID etc?
might have mixed it up with dPMR, HAMs have lots of overlapping similar stuff... and love gatekeeping.
Nevertheless IMO the mentioned demographics/use-cases want something turnkey ready, ~single button, and currently LORA based stuff is not like that, and is clumsier and needs a certain level of... tinkerer mindset, compared to a commercial license free radio system (which might have been set up with a minimal effort), where learning curve is basically volume knob and PTT button.
I have handed out simple FM radios for total tech-illiterate people (mothers, children, elderly physical workers) in an outdoor event with 0 cell coverage, and comms worked perfectly over the dozen square kilometer area. Biggest incident was a lost radio handset.
v. a satellite enabled phone that can send text messages over thousands of kilometers?
These people should not be making a short range text solution, they should be building a low bandwidth internet extension with gateways to the real internet. Most of the information content of the internet can readily fit over 56kb lines once you strip out all the fluff. And in an emergency where you need or want a decentralized mesh network, that's more important that being able to text, who exactly?
If you see this technology and think "wow! that solves [problem I already have]" - then it's great.
Otherwise, you buy a couple, set them up, spend a week or two sending very slow and unreliably forwarded messages that mostly amount to "hi! i have an ACME 32ABC radio! What do you have?", and then put it in a drawer or sell it on.
Just like ham radio, really.
People will go on and on about what happens to society when the internet or cell service goes offline, but when they see an emergency solution staring them directly in the face, they wonder what the use case is.
Just like ham radio, it's a an interesting technical hobby for those that may get excited when their little 0.25W radio hits a repeater 80km away.
More practically, I'm going to try it out while camping this summer. In areas with low or no cell coverage, my phone is useless or dies quickly. Throw a repeater in a tree, and hand your friends nodes.
You send "test" and hope that someone replies.
Sometimes you discuss new Meshtastic gear or setting up a router together.
Its one of the few places you can be fairly sure you're chatting to people, not bots, who have no agenda to sell you anything.
Of course if it ever becomes popular, that will quickly change. But for now it is like early IRC.
No one has once ever spoken to me on it.
Even if someone did, you’d only get every 10th message.
LoRa is for long range lower power communication. It can achieve a range of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in practical conditions and up to 330 kilometers (210 miles) in perfect conditions. There are plenty of applications for it.
"What is the use case?"
Advertising services
But only if use of the network becomes popular
(Generally no one thought this would be the eventual use case for the internet)
I would love to be able to get text alerts when an event occurs, from a location that is not connected to the Internet, about a mile away. The need is not critical, so there is no desire to spend money every month. And reliability of the solution does not have to be high either.
Something like this might work?
Yes.
One of the use cases is pairing it up with ATAK or similar tactical awareness system during SAR operations by volunteer brigades in remote areas with spotty coverage by regular networks.
More info here if someone's interested: https://www.civtak.org/
I set up my first node after the last major Verizon outage that rendered my cell phone useless as a mobile communications device. Now, when the next outage happens, with the always-on base station that I have at home, I can bring a portable Meshtastic radio out with me, paired to my phone via Bluetooth, and retain the ability communicate wirelessly back home, or with any of the other many nodes in the extensive network here in the NYC / Hudson Valley region. I also enticed a couple of local friends to install them and we often opt to text over the mesh. I see it as a thing that is fun to play around with now, but which may become critical at some point in the future.
Like HAM radio: nobody needs it, until a real emergency strikes.
Then everyone does.
Except the bandwidth just isn't there.
There's not much bandwidth in HAM radio either.
Any bandwidth is better than zero.
The use case is off grid communications for whatever you might need.
95% of it is people just doing ping? Pong! In chat.
The cheapest devices are like $10. Order one and have a go.
I'm using one of those devices with a tiny eink screen... as a pocket ebook reader. Sorry for the bait. Fun and easy project though, lookup Pala one if you're interested and dm me for improved firmware (restrictive license)
Sounds intriguing. How is the battery life? Color e-ink or BW?
Would be great if it also ran some type of Topo mapping software!
BW. I don't think colour would do much, as the screen is 250x122. Battery may depend on what you can find, but the one I have should last several weeks (still testing). I started on a tiny LiPo I ripped from my cat's floppy fish toy.
To give more info here, it uses Heltec Wireless Paper, which is a self-contained unit and just needs a battery added.
> What is the use case?
I worked R&D on LoRa project a few years ago. Their use case was a long-range emergency communication system for workers in remote areas(no wifi, lte or LEO at that time). Now I see a bunch of applications in this field that aren't what you describe. :)
I've seen it used by folks off-roading/overlanding for coms.
Gov/DoD/SpecOps use it to maintain radio connectivity with things like the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK).
It's really for closed user groups. At least meshtastic doesn't allow you to see other people's messages, only those in your own group. They're all encrypted.
I built one and found absolutely no use for it. No one ever, and I mean ever, answers you. It's sort of like ham radio, where you get your technician license and get on a net and discover people are just talking about their antennas. Except it's worse, because all the antenna discussions are happening on Reddit and Discord and not on the network itself.
People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".
The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.
HAM I think used to be more popular when it didnt have all this competition and it makes total sense
Being nerdy.
But also you don’t build these things when you need them (it will be too late), you need to build them before you need them.
There is no real use case, IMO. I setup a few nodes a couple of months ago. It's mostly no activity, punctuated by some random "can you read me" type messages, and for some unknown reason people who think there is something impressive about them having a node on a commercial flight.
The entire thing would fall over in any kind of scenario where you needed to rely on this janky mesh network as a primary means of communications.
It can be fun/useful for very out of the way things where you have a handful of people out camping, or other off-grid situations. But frankly even in those cases there are far better/established ways to keep in sync if you need to (eg: FRS).
This stuff is mostly a solution looking for a problem.
Digital Radio Hobbying, think HAM radio but with a microcontroller and apps.
hiking with so far you don't have cell access. cruises when you don't have cell access.
are you a fed? lol.
We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly.
This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.
We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).
I took a plunge into learning about mesh networks, specifically because I love the idea of p2p/decentralized systems of communication. To be honest, I was surprised to find that my expectations for “where we are at” with this type of technology was pretty off-base. For some reason I thought by now it would be straightforward to do a little more than text messaging over a truly public and decentralized off-internet mesh. Maybe I’ve missed some things in my search (still learning!) and someone can correct my understanding.
The Reticulum Network Stack is a more generic lora capable protocol. It is intended to run over almost any two way link so it's less bandwidth efficient per packet than Meshtastic but in return it gives you packet routing rather than flooding. It can be run over TCP, LoRa, WiFi, etc.
https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect.
There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide
If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.
This is awesome. I love that people are working on this. I wish for the day I can own a box that boots up, and gives me the 90s-00s internet experience without needing to ask permission from a bunch of middlemen.
For the oldest school feel - https://spectrum.ieee.org/run-a-meshtastic-bbs
Reticulum has more to offer, it’s just not the welcome mat/filter the others are.
Chit-chat is one thing.
Now that actually sounds interesting!
You can create a network tunnel over meshtastic with the CLI. I haven't had the time to try it but I assume it's quite slow.
It's ok, I don't read that fast.
I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs.
It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.
I tried meshtastic but there is literally nobody around me.
It's like trying to get friends to use signal. I've moved to Meshcore recently and it gets me connected to the rest of the UK. But it took me 2 dedicated repeaters.
I love the meshcore homesassitant plugin, managed to setup some alerts to send out a message on a private channel every 5 minutes if I lose power as an example.
Nice to hear your experience, as it sounds similar to where i'm currently at. I'm in the south of Norway and there's not much activity on Meshcore yet. I had set up a repeater on a nearby hill, and then one Saturday I started receiving messages in the public channel. At first I thought someone was passing by in town, but I soon realized (and confirmed) that these were messages from Denmark! Some were 200+ KMs away (mostly over sea). I was chatting to people and even able to login to a remote Repeater. I was flabbergasted. Now I'm using the amazing antenna coverage function within the MC app to find best locations of repeaters, which is a fun pastime on itself, especially in a hilly environment. It's a fun and educational exeperience if nothing else! It reminds me very much of packet radio back in the 90s, similar vibe.
Yes! I used that antenna coverage functionality to plan my repeater locations. It worked well.
I just picked up a T1000-E to take on holiday next week, interested if I see anything in the air of in Europe.
Same. The internet isn’t fun anymore, and hasn’t been in a long time.
These local meshes remind me of BBS days. You have to know a few things to access it and the community is all the better for it.
Somewhat related thread from the past days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 that also discusses Reticulum which is an interesting project in the same space too.
From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows.
They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..
Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).
The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.
As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
> As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all.
Indeed, but when talking to friends who find Meshtastic / Meshcore interesting we often also talk about Reticulum as it has some overlaps and is an interesting project.
Seems like Meshtastic could be replaced by something like BitChat (no hardware needed) for smaller groups and adhoc use (like the example you give of a group on a trip)
If you are going to have the setup and work of repeater nodes though doesnt something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense?
I have a node running 24/7 (I also happen to be hosting one of the dozen or so things network nodes in my city) and while the idea is great, the adoption is close to 0. In a city with a 2+ million residents, I see a handful of users, as in less than 10. Same with the things network actually.
Love meshtastic. There’s something about the setup friction that has the vibe of early internet, select community, high signal, nobody trying to monetize your attention.
Agreed. And opt-in. Early internet access required some knowledge about computers.
If you're interested in Meshtastic, just try Meshcore instead. It's the natural hobbiest progression. Eventually you'll get tired of Meshtastic being nothing but telemetry from unknown nodes, nobody talks, it's a ghost town of weak links. Meshcore on the other hand has people actually having conversations, networks that span whole states, and diagnostic tools that actually work and are informative for describing the network around you.
Having tried both, I definitely agree.
* MeshCore has a lot more reach than Meshtastic. Often 100+ kilometers compared to just a few kilometers. Even if MT is more popular in your area, there's a good chance that MC will give you far more actual range.
* The online node maps for both are unreliable. I don't recommend relying on them for anything.
* Meshtastic uses a basic flood algorithm, up to 3 hops by default and with a hard limit of 7. Every device works as a repeater.
* MeshCore distinguishes between Companions and Repeaters. It uses flood routing by default, and attempts to establish smarter direct routes where possible. Companions are end-user devices for sending and receiving messages. Repeaters are ideally mounted high up in a static location, and they forward packets they receive. Companions normally don't act as repeaters, but can do so if needed in off-grid situations using the "off-grid repeat" setting.
* Some are concerned about whether MeshCore is open-source. The firmware contains everything important, and is fully open-source. The official companion client app is closed-source freemium. But it's simply a GUI that talks to an API over Bluetooth, TCP, or Serial. The official CLI client is open-source, and you can use any client app you want, including the popular MeshCore-open app.
I don't think this is quite accurate advice. Go where the activity is. Around me, in a city of ~1.5M, the Meshtastic community is quite active. They've worked with local ham radio clubs. They have members setting up a larger mesh that stretches the state from north to south. Meshcore isn't as active, although people are experimenting with it just like Meshtastic. But because Meshtastic has more local users, that's what I would recommend to people here. Meanwhile, places like the PNW and Boston have adopted Meshcore. So I might recommend new users there to try Meshcore. It's okay to have both.
This us vs them/there must be a winner attitude that I see in both communities is really toxic and unnecessary. Look at ham radio: some people use CW, some people use SSB, some people use SSTV, some people use FT8 (but not everyone! There are still hams using other digital modes), many operators dabble in a mix of the above. There are a variety of options and nobody is pressuring other operators to use a particular mode or band.
Maybe it depends? In my city, the online map shows only 2 Meshcore nodes, while Meshtastic 36 nodes.
And I've never spent time learning about it, but I'm under the impression Meshtastic is all about open-source and closer to ham radio philosophy, while Meshcore is backed by some for-profit organization?
Meshcore is MIT licensed open source firmware. There are both open source and closed source client softwares. You get to choose which you support. I think that's where the confusion comes in. It's no more for-profit than Meshtastic, which gets revenue from partnerships with hardware vendors
The biggest problem with Meshtastic is that discussions about it inevitably get spammed by Meshcore evangelicals.
Good to know. I had been teetering on picking this stuff up for a month or so. Now that I know it is yet another tech nerd thing that has an Us vs Them zealotry (or Pepsi Taste Loyalty Test), I'm sold. If I profile as iPhone, Playstation, ReplayTV over TiVo, Sega over NES, C64, videodisc over cassette (I blame my dad for that) which side should I choose? Does either one have better quality zealots (I want to be on the other side)?
true, that tends to happen when there's a better but lesser known choice for most applications; one feels motivated to share. To each their own though, there's all kinds out here. Some people like linux, some people like windows, some like to do both
It's because we've tried Meshtastic and MeshCore. Look at where the bytes go in the network. Meshtastic it's usually under 5% of traffic is text and for MeshCore it's over 50%. If you want to communicate MeshCore is designed to do that.
I assume there's no firmware that can speak both, or create a bridge?
Is there something preventing people from just setting up both?
not at all, many do run both, although usually a preference for one or the other presents itself quickly
This is bad advice. The choice depends on which is more popular in your area. For me in Phoenix that’s meshtastic.
Meshtastic has been a game changer for local off-grid comms. The barrier to entry with ESP32 LoRa boards is low enough that anyone can spin up a node in minutes. Glad to see it getting more attention here.
Meshtastic is really cool! The heltec v4 is the best board for it you can get on Amazon.
Put it on your roof with a cheap solar panel meant for a security camera, and join it to your home WiFi.
Just use the little plastic case it came in as an enclosure. Cut a hole for the antenna and USB.
A slightly larger antenna will help. There are many on Amazon, and they’re cheap.
(I have tried lots of boards and this has been the best setup for me)
Check out this map: https://api.phillymesh.net/map for live data from the Philadelphia area.
The edges drawn are between nodes that have been able to hear each other in the last 24 hours, based on observed traceroute packets.
(Even then, it’s only a subset of the actually-connected nodes: the map only shows nodes that have published their position on the public channel, and have set a flag that their data is okay to uplink to a server over MQTT.)
There was apparently drama, should we be using this or meshcore?
I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama.
For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it.
Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones.
Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
the merits of one are largely vibe-coded by one overly enthusiastic guy.
This is wrong.
One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before.
The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.
This is the first I've heard of it so I guess its not a real project then.
It totally is a real project. Their marketing guy tried to take off with the trademark, long story. He's the vibe coder, and is trying to carry on like it's all good while the community went with the actual firmware/client devs.
I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
I'm on a fence about this.
First, the biggest issue r/n is the concern that external internet will be limited to a point of no return, for this meshtastic is quite useless because to go across the border you need powerful transmitters and risk of placing and maintaining them near the border. In russia this is not only risk of going to prison but also being literally shot if border patrol/FSB overreacts. Even if you're successful bandwidth is miniscule compared to what a modern country needs to communicate internationally.
Second, due to Ukraine piggybacking on cellular networks for drone targeting/control cell service is frequently disrupted by authorities in the areas of a likely attack (it's obviously as effective as this sounds compounded by general incompetence of the government). While they cannot shut it down completely because russia still doesn't want to go back to the stone age, this concern is largely non-existent for meshtastic though. If it becomes widely popular and coverage expands, it also could be used by Ukraine as a control network, and in this case I would expect russian authorities to just jam the whole frequency range and be done with it. So the moment it becomes viable alternative is the moment it will be shut down.
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
https://meshmap.net
https://www.meshcoretel.ru/en/MOW/map
Maybe other maps too...
I thing Russia's main problem (not only with mesh) is that you have millions of people living in or near few cities and very few inbetween.
And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
> And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
It's just a personal opinion, but I really think this is not the case in reality.
Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks. They have more practical scenarios, more to gain and better conditions for great distances.
A friend of mine lives far away from me, barely populated area, a big city in between of us. He struggled to get any network traffic, but now he uses narrow antennas to point to particular repeaters and suddenly the whole metropolis is open to him. We talk with acceptable delivery rates (I'm guessing 70%, which is actually very decent in dense area like mine). He is currently trying to expand his local network. His neighbors are less technical, but they have frequent power failures and need alternative way to reach each other.
On the other hand there is A LOT of client nodes and repeaters in my city. Many struggle to reach even a single repeater - hard to access roofs, high buildings, crowded network with plenty of conflicts. This kills motivation for many.
>Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks
Population dynamics in Russia are vastly different than in the West.
Geeks don't exist or survive in the countryside.
Not only it's abject poverty, it's also the culture that penalizes anyone who sticks out.
Russian countryside is kept poor and uneducated with no opportunities other than signing a military contract. That's how Russia was able to fight its 3-day invasion of Ukraine for 4 years without doing a full scale mobilization.
Anyone who even knows what a "mesh network" is would be in a city.
That's one aspect in which Ukraine and Russia are different.
Put one of these onto the hill and you might have more luck: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html
You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/
I don't own the hill and there are people living on it, and I don't particularly want to hang up nodes on council property or worse, private property
In that case I think Reticulum would be the better use case as it's encrypted from the start.
https://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html
Reticulum is an open-source, cryptography-based networking stack designed to build secure, resilient, and decentralized low-bandwidth wide-area networks using readily available hardware. It operates efficiently over various mediums like LoRa, WiFi, Ethernet, and serial connections, enabling autonomous communication that cannot be easily censored, surveilled, or controlled
There are lot of Meshtastic nodes over Moscow and some larger cities.
Since wired internal connection inside Russia is not limited, so _for now_ there is no need in dense LoRa meshes - Meshtastic mqtt transport will work just fine.
Are you trying about cross-border communication in event where the internet is somehow blocked near the border?
I'm surprised there's many comments here, and so many folks even still who haven't heard of Mesh. And no real comments on them as an organization.
Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/
Meshtastic is… okay, but I was seriously put off the fact that a node can’t work with multiple clients (like phone and desktop) cooperatively, even with TCP transports. And that’s a protocol design issue, it has single client in mind. Virtual nodes didn’t work for me (I verified every configurable knob but I haven’t bothered debugging what goes on under the hood).
But it’s the only radio-based mesh network I’ve ever “seen” anyone else on.
Have a look at meshrank and the current map over UK. It’s quite wild how much coverage there is.
I'd expect a group that cared about privacy and security... not to need a cookie consent dialog like that.
My understanding is that the rules around those is similar to prop 65 rules. So unfocused as to dilute the original purpose.
The cookies used by the site appear to almost all be from Cloudflare, GitHub, YouTube: service providers that are not at all interested in enabling a cookie-free web site, and chose this route as malicious compliance. There's also one cookie to store a language preference that could be handled through HTTP headers instead.
I find it weird that the hop limit is 3 bits, wouldn't that limit the effective range a lot?
Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
To be fair, the hop limit has to die somewhere. It's an intricate balancing act of causing packet storms vs failure to deliver messages.
6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient.
Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
It's flood routed. 3 bits is probably far past what is practical, except in very linear low-node-count networks.
Yeah, I was expecting something fancier than flood routing.
Perhaps a per node hash of known recent routes to avoid flooding every single time and using flooding as a backup.
Meshcore does up to 64 and I regularly see flood messages with +30 hops. They use a different routing though.
For people who don't think they have an immediate use for either meshtastic or meshcore, it's fine to disregard it and just dig in further into the capabilities of the LoRA radios used. They can be used fairly effectively for some very long reach serial bridge connections for telemetry and command/control of DIY IOT things and similar.
LoRA is also used extensively for hobby size UAV handheld controller/ground control station to air unit controls, and in its narrower channel sizes can be very long range. The well known TBS crossfire serial bridge radio system which predates LoRA by a number of years uses a chipset that is sort of an ancestor of current-gen LoRA stuff.
If you setup meshtastic for the love of all that is holy reindex your channels so the public channel is 1 instead of 0. Range tests default to 0. The public channel in my area is regularly spammed with range test and is useless for any meaningful "community" communication. Instructions https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
Has this issue been reported? It seems like an obvious design flaw.
Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
If anyone's interested in the really low level radio modulation bits too, you might enjoy this talk I gave at last years Defcon: https://youtu.be/SM1XSxP6W78
You might like a project I’ve been having on. I’m having fun with it. https://donglora.com/
Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) has a good video on this and some other interesting related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk
To me, one of the most interesting parts of Meshtastic is the Websphere MQ roots of MQTT and all the goodness of observability and data analysis that comes from an open message broker.
Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh
I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times.
Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters.
My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet.
Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent.
I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved.
I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested.
KR4KZI 73
Hats off to you on the ham license! My friend just got hers too!
Re: markdown and hugo, that's an excellent combo. You could easily setup a raspberry pi or $5/mo vps to serve it behind caddy/traefik/nginx and have a working multipage app (mpa) in a weekend.
Or a few minutes with AI haha
The AI route has proven exceedingly strange for me. Most notable are the absolutely wild variations in output quality, which range from brilliant to literally destructive and bizarre (GPT gave me a command during basic troubleshooting that completely bricked the firmware for my ip-cam*). Ideally this should be a viable option, but I seem to be a strangeness magnet with LLMs.
*That and literally hundreds more equal or worse.
After CopyFail (and apparently a lot more), I am thinking I might force myself to BSD for servers, and maybe even my work station. And there's a new idea! An LLM specifically trained for BSD....
I haven't messed with this yet, to me it seems like it could theoretically map all device locations, triangulating positions? Has that been addressed?
Yes, as I understand it, you choose the level of location precision to share https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/channels/#po...
That's known as Transmitter Hunting (aka Fox Hunting).
It's a fundamental flaw of most wireless communication. Are you referring to something more specific?
I think that is more of a directional antenna approach? I’m more talking about triangulation, we used to be able to do it with cell towers and if you had 3 or more in range we could get pretty accurate location (now that seems to be locked down).
So many of the off-the-shelf hardware options linked to are out of stock or discontinued. Feels like DIY is the only way right now
Comparison of Meshtastic vs MeshCore:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...
And why MeshCore forked from Meshtastic:
https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split
That post is about the development team "splitting" with the PR guy that is trying to get a trademark on the name and creating their own vibe coded paid client/app.
There's a history between Tastic and Core, but it's a different one. Meshtastic doesn't scale that well in urban areas and it seems that some on the Mestastic team didn't see that problem as a priority/ignored the problem/are too stubborn. And then Meshcore is created with a different routing, works much better in practice, proving that the mesh could be much better. In countries like the UK it seems to have replaced Meshtastic in most places.
That article seems to be about how Meshcore split into two, with one contributor forking the code and taking the previously official website with him.
There's no mention of Meshtastic.
My understanding is that the split is more superficial than that. The contributor in question (he used to do YouTube videos mainly, no contributions to the firmware) created his own vibe coded app/client and is trying to own the trademark on the Meshcore name. He controls the .co.uk site, the youtube channel, and the discord group. The firmware is still the same, created by the people behind the new .io website.
So the split is just a "the development team has nothing to do with the .co.uk site, his youtube channel and discord group", not a fork.
I wish they'd mention CellSol but eh.
https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol
You wish Meshtatstic would mention CellSol on the Meshtatstic website? Why would they do that?
Definitely interesting for special use cases. But I don't think the wireless carriers have anything to worry about here.
Some software needs to be refactored and vibe coded, this is the prime example of that.
Then what?
Then it might work reliably
As someone interested in 3D and geometry but with no interest in radio - I find the naming clash most irritating!
If only I had a penny for every HN comment about naming conflicts.
Well, it is one of the 2 hard problems...