I started experimenting with meshtastic in December last year, but so far it has been a really quiet network, so I'm not seeing the congestion problems the author highlights. According to meshmap there should be a node ~2 miles from my house but I don't reliably see it. I don't see the next closest at 4.3 miles either. For some reason I saw the next furthest (~8.4 miles) for a few days, but it has since disappeared. Since Christmas I've seen 583 nodes from mine - none reliably.

My node is a solar powered tree hanger hanging maybe 25 ft above the ground, and I'm in southeast michigan with a typical ~30 minute commute into the suburban cities.

I really liked this article but in the end it reinforced my belief in meshtastic - I don't need a computer connected to my node and I'm not paying for any meshcore features. I just wish there were more fixed nodes out there to extend the network.

IMHO this article misses a couple really important points.

First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.

Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.

This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.

It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.

I’ve spent my entire career in telco and networking and loved the rise of Wi-Fi (which we used spectacularly over long distances when the spectrum was clear to show off my mates in 3G/microwave backhaul), and have been keeping up with LoRA and related stuff (got a few HelTec boards), but all the recent meshtastic/core/etc. stuff feels a bit like the early wardriving community (and CB radio): fun, full of ideas, but without enough structure (or mass appeal) to take off.

I do wish we had a proper, working emergency meshing standard, though. An international one, too.

>To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post.

Yeah, that's the general feel I get every time I poke into Mesh*. Neat radio tech, fun toy to find other nearby nerds, instantly-obvious problems that are fatal to growing beyond being that toy (or small specialized personal nets, where it's totally fine). They feel more like a tech demo than anything actually intended to survive.

Which is fine, you kinda need that to start out, and they do work today. Just... hard to get excited about.

One aspect of MeshCore and similar technologies I really like is that the end user devices can directly communicate with each other seamlessly - if you have 2 MeshCore companions nearby, they can just send messages directly, no need for a repeater.

In comparison 2 modern smartphones with no WiFi AP or no cell coverage can't really use any of the usual messaging (or even data transfer) services to communicate directly. Yeah, there are some ways to connect via bluetooth or a mobile wifi hotspot, but it all looks like very begrudgingly added and not well supported for easy use by mainstream mobile OS and hardware companies.

This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.

I am an happy user of Meshstastic since more than one year (I have two active nodes and a third one is in the making). I am living in hilly countryside and the difficult that I have experienced is about reaching other nodes: with the standard antenna, I can barely connect with nodes in a 500 meters range, with a better antenna (coaxial collinear is the best IMHO) I can reach more than 10km.

I don't think the Meshstatic approach of "flooding" the network with all the messages can be scalable in the long run, they need to implement some sort of routing protocols (like BATMAN), but they are heavy and complex to implement

Set up solar nodes last weekend. 200 miles of range now. Nerds, mad ideas. Good times.

After seeing the Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467 I wonder if they would pair well with Reticulum

I’ve looked at this stuff, because of its utility as an emergency communication system.

I’m not sure if any of the open standards are there yet, but that may just be, because there isn’t money to be made, so no commercial entity has approached it (like GoTenna, which appears to be the only successful one, but uses a proprietary protocol).

Please someone design a worldwide mesh network. Mix of wireless and wired links.

Like the internet, but self-configuring and peer to peer.

Yes, there are lots of technical and social challenges, but I don't believe they are unsolvable.

I just started trying Meshtastic last month, there's nobody doing it in my city so it's just me giving esp32s to friends to try to make a mesh, but I'm getting into range limitations because I don't know enough people to bridge some gaps !

I even tried changing the radio preset to Very slow Long for example, but I didn't really get better range, I don't know why.

I really like LoRa and its range, but unfortunately the hardware is much more expensive than e.g. Zigbee or WiFi devices.

Would love a LoRaWAN router but they run around ~80€/80$ and just for playing around with it it is a bit much.

Meshtastic and MQTT are part of my home network

https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/

I was the first to setup a Meshcore room server in my city. New I get pings from all over the place and it's busy. It seems to be extremely popular in Switzerland for some reason.

Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.

Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!

https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum is the official mirror for reticulum

Saw this at https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-net... and thought it was interesting

Just to throw in my experience, got 2 RAK19007 after the last HN post. Mostly just for me and my kid to play with. He took an interest in Flipper Zero recently and Mestastic seems like a fun expansion on that interest. In the Western NY area, about a week up and running, devices just sitting on my desk, I've got a node list of 215, and I've communicated with people from Rochester to Canada.

Does 802.11p work in any of these mesh networks? It could amplify their usefulness.

I'd pivot over to the MANET folks (https://openmanet.net/). The 900MHz HaLow stuff is exciting to see on the data front for some moderate-speed data connectivity.

(It's basically an open source version of an MPU-5, basically. https://persistentsystems.com/mpu5/)

In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks.

More of everything, of course! But I'm far more interested in making the wifi we have more ad-hoc capable, more useful anywhere any time, for whatever, especially on the longer range bands like 900MHz.

Am I the only one who thinks MeshCore shouldn’t be called „off grid“?

Unlike Meshtastic and Reticulum, the need for router nodes is built into the protocol itself in MeshCore. And while nodes are cheap and amateurs can put them up, that is still a grid that has to exist for your MeshCore client to be useful…

I got into it too back in 2012. Frankly it’s not a very interesting space unless you’re trying to circumvent nation wide internet shutdowns because for everything else encrypted chat channels serve the same purpose and everyone is doing it (WhatsApp, signal, telegram etc)

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