8 ms·

I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

377 points by Panda_ 4mo ago

Panda_ 4mo ago
Saw this at https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-networks-meshtastic-meshcore-and-reticulum/34963 https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-net... and thought it was interesting
Groxx 4mo ago
>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.
- mingus88 4mo ago
  That weakness is a strength. Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything How many places like that are left?
  - Groxx 4mo ago
    It's well suited for that at the moment, yeah - if that's what you're hoping to find by getting into it, it's pretty cheap and now's a great time.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    > Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.
    - Schiendelman 4mo ago
      All unmoderated spaces have this problem. That's why the right wing grew so much on gaming forums, because they were extremely unmoderated. A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g
    - bityard 4mo ago
      Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out
      - mschuster91 4mo ago
        The problem is that takes up valuable airtime. The denser the mesh the more airtime is wasted on the junk.
        m4rtink 4mo ago
        In MeshCore a concept of regions has been recently introduced - you can scope channels and messages to a specific geographic region (which is set on a repeater) and it will not propagate outside of the given region. That way local channels don't need to flood the whole mesh, same as with trying to send a message to someone or reach the management interface of a repeater you know is in a given area.
        mschuster91 4mo ago
        Oh I am aware of that feature. The problem is, all repeater administrators in a region need to cooperate - and a lot of repeaters are abandoned. And it doesn't help at all if the troll is aware of regions.
        m4rtink 4mo ago
        In practice at this quite early stage of MeshCore development I would say that repeater need some regular maintenance (like the recent firmware update needed 1b -> 2b) so if they are abandoned, they will eventually fall out of the network. As for trolls and regions - based on how you setup the regions a troll might need to physically travel to cause wider issues, as their traffic might no longer propagate through the whole mesh.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
  The inherent limitations of free spectrum mesh technologies will never lend itself to a replacement for the Internet so will always largely exist in niches. Niches like personal nets, local nerd networks, or emergency response (tho actual first responders are not the most eager to try this stuff based on my experiences in the community.) All of this can be a feature or a bug depending on whom you ask.
- robotswantdata 4mo ago
  This is by design. It’s like BBS again
  - Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
    Amateur Ham technicians were doing packet radio long before (AX.25) the Internet made it into homes. =3 https://aprs.world/ https://aprs.world/
- alnwlsn 4mo ago
  It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet. I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network. Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not. I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale. To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work! *disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!
  - sehugg 4mo ago
    I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.
    - alnwlsn 4mo ago
      I don't know man, I was just trying to follow the official build instructions. If that's not Meshtastic I don't know what is. The (lack of) reliability in the network is the main issue with it though, but that's already been covered elsewhere in this thread.
- throwawaycan 4mo ago
  On the mesh in Toronto with meshcore we have regular communication that reach all the way to Buffalo. We are past the « toy » stage, it’s truly impressive.
  - mikestorrent 4mo ago
    The Salish Mesh over here on the west coast also gets some pretty good range, though there are lots of holes in the network
  - Groxx 4mo ago
    Meshcore seems a lot better thought out in that respect, yea. Flood routing is a very-well-known dead-end.
    - Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
      Meshtastic was never designed to be a wide mesh, it was originally meant for personal networks.
- bergie 4mo ago
  I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.
  - pelotron 4mo ago
    Now we're talking.
  - Groxx 4mo ago
    Boating seems like a pretty good fit here, yeah - adhoc and semi local, and everyone already relies on radio for stuff. And no issues with line of sight. Is there no longer-range p2p digital tech here though? It tooks to me like this would always be island-local, if even that, and probably useless while further out. Though for inland stuff like smaller lakes that's not a problem.
    - bergie 4mo ago
      The traditional longer-range P2P is HF radio and maybe Winlink email on that. APRS over HF is also possible, and Reticulum would be too if hams were allowed to use encryption. On the passage from Panama to Polynesia we had daily HF radio contact with Hawaii and California. Sometimes radio weather was pretty bad, but generally it worked out. In practice nowadays passage communications for 99% of boats is WhatsApp over Starlink, with maybe Garmin InReach as backup.
- torginus 4mo ago
  I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes. I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.
  - Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
    They don't. Resilience isn't additive. The more nodes you add, the more announcements and traffic you add, which congests the network further. Regular internet topologies work because of high throughput backbones.
    - torginus 4mo ago
      my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors. This is very much like pathfinding in a video game - you know how to get to a next the next grid square, and also your region you are in knows how to get to its neighboring ones - recursively to the top, but said info is distributed heuristically through the network. Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.
      - Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
        > my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors. That doesn't change the fact that announces and extra nodes can still degrade performance. For one, it's hard to know whether a new link is better or worse than other existing links. Link conditions can also change which is very common in the kind of mesh networks folks are putting together using LoRA on antennas. > Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case. Yes these are called repeater nodes in Meshcore and are already well known. Repeaters still don't have the same QoS that fiber backbones of the usual Internet have. The reason the Internet works well is because your packets are routed from your house eventually to a backbone network that helps the packet get close to its destination, and the backbone networks themselves are very top-down statically routed affairs with high capacity and QoS. Once all of your repeaters are connected via high QoS fiber links you end up with the Internet topology we already have today.
jauntywundrkind 4mo ago
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.
- Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
  Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.
  - neilalexander 4mo ago
    HaLow is just Wi-Fi on sub-1GHz frequencies and narrower channels. You get normal MTUs and TCP & UDP work just fine.
- mycall 4mo ago
  [dead]
- bergie 4mo ago
  I think there are people playing with Halow with Reticulum. That's one advantage of having a multi-transport system. There is also a Bluetooth transport now: https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720 https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720
raffael_de 4mo ago
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.
- RRRA 4mo ago
  In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me. Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app. On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh. I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
  - raffael_de 4mo ago
    I have difficulty following you. > a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me. Why? WiFi technology is cheap and available. Seems like a great basis for a mesh. > Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app. Why "just"? All the internet protocols are also just messaging at the end of the day - request: A sends message to B, response: B sends message to A. > On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff I'm not familiar with Reticulum (neither with Mesh* in any meaningful way) - do you mean to say that Reticulum is more flexible regarding the radio technology - as in: no need to by specific devices like for Meshcore? > I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything. Can't say I disagree, sadly.
ericrosedev 4mo ago
After seeing the Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467 I wonder if they would pair well with Reticulum
- Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
  These ideas yes, but these networks already have a concept of message oriented semantics and so there's not much of a need to rebuild most of those protocols. A lot of what Finger, Gopher, et al does is define the application layer semantics to transmit documents over stream oriented protocols.
- bergie 4mo ago
  A lot of the "early internet" protocols would likely pair quite well, especially ones based on UDP. However, Reticulum has its own active "small web" implementation with NomadNet and the Micron markup.
robotswantdata 4mo ago
Set up solar nodes last weekend. 200 miles of range now. Nerds, mad ideas. Good times.
- giwook 4mo ago
  What do you need 200 miles of range for?
  - swaits 4mo ago
    RTO
    - NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
      what does that stand for?
      - thejazzman 4mo ago
        Reading The Onion
      - steve_adams_86 4mo ago
        Return To Office
      - giwook 4mo ago
        Race The Otter
      - qsxfthnkp2322 4mo ago
        Reno To Oakland
      - ux266478 4mo ago
        Restarting The Oracle
      - at-fates-hands 4mo ago
        Racing Towards Oblivion
transcriptase 4mo ago
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!
- willis936 4mo ago
  I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete. 915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
- ews 4mo ago
  it works incredibly well at Burning Man, so you are completely right!
- mikeweiss 4mo ago
  Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...
- dclaw 4mo ago
  WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
- m4rtink 4mo ago
  I have a very different experience - here in Europe with 868 MHz MeshCore you get good singnal from a repeater through one or two city blocks with non ideal antenna placement. With reasonable line of sight tens of kilometers & much more is doable. There are some repeaters on mountains that connect bigger regional meshes with packets going >100 km regularly. https://mapa.meshcore.cz/ https://mapa.meshcore.cz/
mycall 4mo ago
Does 802.11p work in any of these mesh networks? It could amplify their usefulness.
- Panda_ 4mo ago
  Reticulum would probably be the best one for it. As far as I can tell there aren't any interfaces for it already, but if you can get a command that transfers data using stdin and sdtout, Reticulum has things like the PipeInterface https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html
transitivebs 4mo ago
https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum is the official mirror for reticulum
- moebrowne 4mo ago
  Official manual including install instructions: https://markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/ https://markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/
smlacy 4mo ago
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.
- Thomashuet 4mo ago
  > the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works. Isn't it the case with Meshtastic and Reticulum too? It feels like it should be part of the definition of mesh network.
- worldsayshi 4mo ago
  > no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what Can't they just triangulate the nodes and hack or unplug them? And put whoever objects into prison?
  - mytailorisrich 4mo ago
    Meshtastic/core are very easy to disrupt or jam, anyway.
- philipallstar 4mo ago
  > 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. Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
dyauspitr 4mo ago
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)
- cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
  I have some really bad news for you, mate.
  - dyauspitr 4mo ago
    What is it?
pslab 4mo ago
[flagged]
FabCH 4mo ago
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…
- kstrauser 4mo ago
  No, you're not alone. MeshCore is very neat tech, but I love that you can show up to, say, a music fest with a few Meshtastic radios and voila, instant mesh. To me, it feels more in the spirit of the thing. That's purely subjective, but that's how I see it.
- Doman 4mo ago
  You totally can use Meshcore without repeater, and companions can be used like routers. This functionality can be enabled any time using one checkbox in app. It switches the radios to slightly different frequency and enables repeat mode in personal nodes, this gives you one small network. No repeater needed. And in this mode you don't clutter "main" mesh with your local mesh. The main difference between Meshcore and Meshtastic is how telemetry is handled. In Meshcore to get telemetry the other party needs to request it, whereas in Meshtastic telemetry is sent in flood mode in configured intervals. That's why Meshtastic is better suited for (A)TAK [1]. But because Meshtastic sends telemetry anyway there is less and less airtime for chat messages, and it gets to the point where you can't talk to people. For small groups this is fine, for bigger groups/meshes this is no bueno. [1] https://tak.gov/ https://tak.gov/ - (A) stands for Android app.
  - FabCH 4mo ago
    „main“ mesh IS „the grid“ If I have to modify settings and effectively kick myself off the mesh, then it doesn’t matter which protocol I use. By the same logic, you can just choose different settings on Meshtastic and get the same results, but you will not have anyone to mesh with.
londons_explore 4mo ago
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.
- bergie 4mo ago
  Isn't that exactly the idea of Reticulum? http://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html http://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    The author seems to prefer Reticulum.
sschueller 4mo ago
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.
lormayna 4mo ago
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
- neilalexander 4mo ago
  None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, AODV-esque routing (which MeshCore tries to do for DMs and Reticulum tries to do in general) is prone to almost-immediate path failure on unstable underlying transports, and the hidden node problem always bites on haphazard/unplanned mesh radio deployments where people show up with nodes in random locations on the same frequency. The cracks are already extremely visible in MeshCore in the UK, where overheads from adverts and dropped packets from collisions mean it is already horrendously unreliable and most of the chatter in the Public channel is people sending test messages and being unsure whether anything they sent was ever heard by anyone. Most other routing protocols (BATMAN included) are also not that well suited to situations where the underlying transport ends up asymmetric, e.g. one node can't hear others but it can be heard, and that's an extremely common occurrence/failure mode in wireless meshes like this. It's a difficult problem to solve with coordination between nodes, let alone without.
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    You have two conditions: not dense enough or too dense and the fractal nature of population mean you can have both. Radio bandwidth is a precious resource and if you think somehow that anything good will come out of sending a packet N times you are not likely to manage a wireless network successfully. There are systems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys... But they are pretty specialized and not that scalable
rcarmo 4mo ago
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.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
  I believe it's called ham radio
  - rcarmo 4mo ago
    CB stands for Citizen's Band, and was the moniker back in the Usenet days. Yes, I know I am dating myself here.
    - CalRobert 4mo ago
      My uncle definitely had a CB radio in his big rig, not ham, to hear him describe it.
    - tardedmeme 4mo ago
      Yes, and ham radio is the international emergency mesh. CB radio isn't.
      - wtallis 4mo ago
        The request was for "a proper, working emergency meshing standard". Ham radio absolutely is not that. Yes, ham radios are used in emergency situations, but usually not as a mesh and certainly not as a standard.
        jagged-chisel 4mo ago
m4rtink 4mo ago
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.
- bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
  I wonder what you are suggesting cell phones should be able to do here?
  - m4rtink 4mo ago
    Text messages to other phones in direct range, ideally voice calling as well, using only built in software. Also (more) seamless direct data transfers. Eg. sending a photo to a friend standing next to me without it going through some Cloud on the Internet.
    - bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
      With which radio?
jibaoproxy 4mo ago
[flagged]
ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
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).
- kanbankaren 4mo ago
  For emergency comms(remember, emergency services provided by the state don't monitor the ham bands, so can't call them), a $20 ham radio would work or just carry FRS radios. FCC does allow use of a ham radio in a real emergency without a license.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of an organized S&R team. They would probably need some robust, non-problematic kit that could work in any environment.
    - kanbankaren 4mo ago
      > They would probably need some robust, non-problematic kit that could work in any environment. Nothing is more robust than ham radio at 144/420 MHz. Even first responders use frequencies adjacent to this and has the same RF propagation characteristics. For S&R teams, you could apply for LMR license. It is valid for 10 years.
moontear 4mo ago
I really like LoRa and its range, but unfortunately the hardware is much more expensive than e.g. Zigbee or WiFi devices. Would love a LoRaWAN router but they run around ~80€/80$ and just for playing around with it it is a bit much.
- halfmatthalfcat 4mo ago
  You can build one with an SX1302/SX1250 and an STM MC for cheap.
  - moontear 4mo ago
    I'm sure! But then I would need a custom PCB and spare time on my hand as well as possibly skills I don't have like SMD soldering. I would love to buy a cheap (~50€/$) finished LoRaWAN gateway product, but those don't exist (yet) AFAIK.
kotaKat 4mo ago
I'd pivot over to the MANET folks (https://openmanet.net/ 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/ https://persistentsystems.com/mpu5/)
rta5 4mo ago
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.
- WhyNotHugo 4mo ago
  Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.
- brk 4mo ago
  I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience. Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing. It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.
  - MiracleRabbit 4mo ago
    For sensor stuff use LoRaWAN + Mirotik Basestation + Chirpstack
- MiracleRabbit 4mo ago
  All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters. Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
LelouBil 4mo ago
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.
itomato 4mo ago
Meshtastic and MQTT are part of my home network https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/ https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/
kgwxd 4mo ago
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.
pseudopolous 4mo ago
[flagged]
xrd 4mo ago
Really interesting to see that the ham radio spectrum prohibits encryption.
zuzululu 4mo ago
I think this is a great movement. I'm also concerned that this is going to be certainly popular with criminals. So there's always this cat and mouse game with new technology like this. I don't know enough about the technology behind this to speculate further.

377 points by Panda_ 4mo ago

Saw this at https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-networks-meshtastic-meshcore-and-reticulum/34963 https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-net... and thought it was interesting

Groxx 4mo ago

>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.

mingus88 4mo ago
That weakness is a strength. Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything How many places like that are left?
- Groxx 4mo ago
  It's well suited for that at the moment, yeah - if that's what you're hoping to find by getting into it, it's pretty cheap and now's a great time.
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  > Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    All unmoderated spaces have this problem. That's why the right wing grew so much on gaming forums, because they were extremely unmoderated. A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g
  - bityard 4mo ago
    Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out
    - mschuster91 4mo ago
      The problem is that takes up valuable airtime. The denser the mesh the more airtime is wasted on the junk.
      - m4rtink 4mo ago
        In MeshCore a concept of regions has been recently introduced - you can scope channels and messages to a specific geographic region (which is set on a repeater) and it will not propagate outside of the given region. That way local channels don't need to flood the whole mesh, same as with trying to send a message to someone or reach the management interface of a repeater you know is in a given area.
        mschuster91 4mo ago
        Oh I am aware of that feature. The problem is, all repeater administrators in a region need to cooperate - and a lot of repeaters are abandoned. And it doesn't help at all if the troll is aware of regions.
        m4rtink 4mo ago
        In practice at this quite early stage of MeshCore development I would say that repeater need some regular maintenance (like the recent firmware update needed 1b -> 2b) so if they are abandoned, they will eventually fall out of the network. As for trolls and regions - based on how you setup the regions a troll might need to physically travel to cause wider issues, as their traffic might no longer propagate through the whole mesh.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
The inherent limitations of free spectrum mesh technologies will never lend itself to a replacement for the Internet so will always largely exist in niches. Niches like personal nets, local nerd networks, or emergency response (tho actual first responders are not the most eager to try this stuff based on my experiences in the community.) All of this can be a feature or a bug depending on whom you ask.
robotswantdata 4mo ago
This is by design. It’s like BBS again
- Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
  Amateur Ham technicians were doing packet radio long before (AX.25) the Internet made it into homes. =3 https://aprs.world/ https://aprs.world/
alnwlsn 4mo ago
It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet. I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network. Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not. I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale. To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work! *disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!
- sehugg 4mo ago
  I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.
  - alnwlsn 4mo ago
    I don't know man, I was just trying to follow the official build instructions. If that's not Meshtastic I don't know what is. The (lack of) reliability in the network is the main issue with it though, but that's already been covered elsewhere in this thread.
throwawaycan 4mo ago
On the mesh in Toronto with meshcore we have regular communication that reach all the way to Buffalo. We are past the « toy » stage, it’s truly impressive.
- mikestorrent 4mo ago
  The Salish Mesh over here on the west coast also gets some pretty good range, though there are lots of holes in the network
- Groxx 4mo ago
  Meshcore seems a lot better thought out in that respect, yea. Flood routing is a very-well-known dead-end.
  - Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
    Meshtastic was never designed to be a wide mesh, it was originally meant for personal networks.
bergie 4mo ago
I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.
- pelotron 4mo ago
  Now we're talking.
- Groxx 4mo ago
  Boating seems like a pretty good fit here, yeah - adhoc and semi local, and everyone already relies on radio for stuff. And no issues with line of sight. Is there no longer-range p2p digital tech here though? It tooks to me like this would always be island-local, if even that, and probably useless while further out. Though for inland stuff like smaller lakes that's not a problem.
  - bergie 4mo ago
    The traditional longer-range P2P is HF radio and maybe Winlink email on that. APRS over HF is also possible, and Reticulum would be too if hams were allowed to use encryption. On the passage from Panama to Polynesia we had daily HF radio contact with Hawaii and California. Sometimes radio weather was pretty bad, but generally it worked out. In practice nowadays passage communications for 99% of boats is WhatsApp over Starlink, with maybe Garmin InReach as backup.
torginus 4mo ago
I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes. I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.
- Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
  They don't. Resilience isn't additive. The more nodes you add, the more announcements and traffic you add, which congests the network further. Regular internet topologies work because of high throughput backbones.
  - torginus 4mo ago
    my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors. This is very much like pathfinding in a video game - you know how to get to a next the next grid square, and also your region you are in knows how to get to its neighboring ones - recursively to the top, but said info is distributed heuristically through the network. Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.
    - Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
      > my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors. That doesn't change the fact that announces and extra nodes can still degrade performance. For one, it's hard to know whether a new link is better or worse than other existing links. Link conditions can also change which is very common in the kind of mesh networks folks are putting together using LoRA on antennas. > Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case. Yes these are called repeater nodes in Meshcore and are already well known. Repeaters still don't have the same QoS that fiber backbones of the usual Internet have. The reason the Internet works well is because your packets are routed from your house eventually to a backbone network that helps the packet get close to its destination, and the backbone networks themselves are very top-down statically routed affairs with high capacity and QoS. Once all of your repeaters are connected via high QoS fiber links you end up with the Internet topology we already have today.

jauntywundrkind 4mo ago

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.

Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.
- neilalexander 4mo ago
  HaLow is just Wi-Fi on sub-1GHz frequencies and narrower channels. You get normal MTUs and TCP & UDP work just fine.
mycall 4mo ago
[dead]
bergie 4mo ago
I think there are people playing with Halow with Reticulum. That's one advantage of having a multi-transport system. There is also a Bluetooth transport now: https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720 https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720

raffael_de 4mo ago

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.

RRRA 4mo ago
In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me. Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app. On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh. I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
- raffael_de 4mo ago
  I have difficulty following you. > a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me. Why? WiFi technology is cheap and available. Seems like a great basis for a mesh. > Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app. Why "just"? All the internet protocols are also just messaging at the end of the day - request: A sends message to B, response: B sends message to A. > On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff I'm not familiar with Reticulum (neither with Mesh* in any meaningful way) - do you mean to say that Reticulum is more flexible regarding the radio technology - as in: no need to by specific devices like for Meshcore? > I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything. Can't say I disagree, sadly.

ericrosedev 4mo ago

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

Karrot_Kream 4mo ago
These ideas yes, but these networks already have a concept of message oriented semantics and so there's not much of a need to rebuild most of those protocols. A lot of what Finger, Gopher, et al does is define the application layer semantics to transmit documents over stream oriented protocols.
bergie 4mo ago
A lot of the "early internet" protocols would likely pair quite well, especially ones based on UDP. However, Reticulum has its own active "small web" implementation with NomadNet and the Micron markup.

robotswantdata 4mo ago

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

giwook 4mo ago
What do you need 200 miles of range for?
- swaits 4mo ago
  RTO
  - NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
    what does that stand for?
    - thejazzman 4mo ago
      Reading The Onion
    - steve_adams_86 4mo ago
      Return To Office
    - giwook 4mo ago
      Race The Otter
    - qsxfthnkp2322 4mo ago
      Reno To Oakland
    - ux266478 4mo ago
      Restarting The Oracle
    - at-fates-hands 4mo ago
      Racing Towards Oblivion

transcriptase 4mo ago

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!

willis936 4mo ago
I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete. 915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
ews 4mo ago
it works incredibly well at Burning Man, so you are completely right!
mikeweiss 4mo ago
Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...
dclaw 4mo ago
WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
m4rtink 4mo ago
I have a very different experience - here in Europe with 868 MHz MeshCore you get good singnal from a repeater through one or two city blocks with non ideal antenna placement. With reasonable line of sight tens of kilometers & much more is doable. There are some repeaters on mountains that connect bigger regional meshes with packets going >100 km regularly. https://mapa.meshcore.cz/ https://mapa.meshcore.cz/

mycall 4mo ago

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

Panda_ 4mo ago
Reticulum would probably be the best one for it. As far as I can tell there aren't any interfaces for it already, but if you can get a command that transfers data using stdin and sdtout, Reticulum has things like the PipeInterface https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html

transitivebs 4mo ago

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

moebrowne 4mo ago
Official manual including install instructions: https://markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/ https://markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/

smlacy 4mo ago

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.

Thomashuet 4mo ago
> the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works. Isn't it the case with Meshtastic and Reticulum too? It feels like it should be part of the definition of mesh network.
worldsayshi 4mo ago
> no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what Can't they just triangulate the nodes and hack or unplug them? And put whoever objects into prison?
- mytailorisrich 4mo ago
  Meshtastic/core are very easy to disrupt or jam, anyway.
philipallstar 4mo ago
> 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. Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.

dyauspitr 4mo ago

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)

cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
I have some really bad news for you, mate.
- dyauspitr 4mo ago
  What is it?

pslab 4mo ago

[flagged]

FabCH 4mo ago

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…

kstrauser 4mo ago
No, you're not alone. MeshCore is very neat tech, but I love that you can show up to, say, a music fest with a few Meshtastic radios and voila, instant mesh. To me, it feels more in the spirit of the thing. That's purely subjective, but that's how I see it.
Doman 4mo ago
You totally can use Meshcore without repeater, and companions can be used like routers. This functionality can be enabled any time using one checkbox in app. It switches the radios to slightly different frequency and enables repeat mode in personal nodes, this gives you one small network. No repeater needed. And in this mode you don't clutter "main" mesh with your local mesh. The main difference between Meshcore and Meshtastic is how telemetry is handled. In Meshcore to get telemetry the other party needs to request it, whereas in Meshtastic telemetry is sent in flood mode in configured intervals. That's why Meshtastic is better suited for (A)TAK [1]. But because Meshtastic sends telemetry anyway there is less and less airtime for chat messages, and it gets to the point where you can't talk to people. For small groups this is fine, for bigger groups/meshes this is no bueno. [1] https://tak.gov/ https://tak.gov/ - (A) stands for Android app.
- FabCH 4mo ago
  „main“ mesh IS „the grid“ If I have to modify settings and effectively kick myself off the mesh, then it doesn’t matter which protocol I use. By the same logic, you can just choose different settings on Meshtastic and get the same results, but you will not have anyone to mesh with.

londons_explore 4mo ago

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.

bergie 4mo ago
Isn't that exactly the idea of Reticulum? http://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html http://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  The author seems to prefer Reticulum.

sschueller 4mo ago

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.

lormayna 4mo ago

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

neilalexander 4mo ago
None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, AODV-esque routing (which MeshCore tries to do for DMs and Reticulum tries to do in general) is prone to almost-immediate path failure on unstable underlying transports, and the hidden node problem always bites on haphazard/unplanned mesh radio deployments where people show up with nodes in random locations on the same frequency. The cracks are already extremely visible in MeshCore in the UK, where overheads from adverts and dropped packets from collisions mean it is already horrendously unreliable and most of the chatter in the Public channel is people sending test messages and being unsure whether anything they sent was ever heard by anyone. Most other routing protocols (BATMAN included) are also not that well suited to situations where the underlying transport ends up asymmetric, e.g. one node can't hear others but it can be heard, and that's an extremely common occurrence/failure mode in wireless meshes like this. It's a difficult problem to solve with coordination between nodes, let alone without.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  You have two conditions: not dense enough or too dense and the fractal nature of population mean you can have both. Radio bandwidth is a precious resource and if you think somehow that anything good will come out of sending a packet N times you are not likely to manage a wireless network successfully. There are systems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys... But they are pretty specialized and not that scalable

rcarmo 4mo ago

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.

tardedmeme 4mo ago
I believe it's called ham radio
- rcarmo 4mo ago
  CB stands for Citizen's Band, and was the moniker back in the Usenet days. Yes, I know I am dating myself here.
  - CalRobert 4mo ago
    My uncle definitely had a CB radio in his big rig, not ham, to hear him describe it.
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    Yes, and ham radio is the international emergency mesh. CB radio isn't.
    - wtallis 4mo ago
      The request was for "a proper, working emergency meshing standard". Ham radio absolutely is not that. Yes, ham radios are used in emergency situations, but usually not as a mesh and certainly not as a standard.
      - jagged-chisel 4mo ago

m4rtink 4mo ago

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.

bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
I wonder what you are suggesting cell phones should be able to do here?
- m4rtink 4mo ago
  Text messages to other phones in direct range, ideally voice calling as well, using only built in software. Also (more) seamless direct data transfers. Eg. sending a photo to a friend standing next to me without it going through some Cloud on the Internet.
  - bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
    With which radio?

jibaoproxy 4mo ago

[flagged]

ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago

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).

kanbankaren 4mo ago
For emergency comms(remember, emergency services provided by the state don't monitor the ham bands, so can't call them), a $20 ham radio would work or just carry FRS radios. FCC does allow use of a ham radio in a real emergency without a license.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of an organized S&R team. They would probably need some robust, non-problematic kit that could work in any environment.
  - kanbankaren 4mo ago
    > They would probably need some robust, non-problematic kit that could work in any environment. Nothing is more robust than ham radio at 144/420 MHz. Even first responders use frequencies adjacent to this and has the same RF propagation characteristics. For S&R teams, you could apply for LMR license. It is valid for 10 years.

moontear 4mo ago

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.

halfmatthalfcat 4mo ago
You can build one with an SX1302/SX1250 and an STM MC for cheap.
- moontear 4mo ago
  I'm sure! But then I would need a custom PCB and spare time on my hand as well as possibly skills I don't have like SMD soldering. I would love to buy a cheap (~50€/$) finished LoRaWAN gateway product, but those don't exist (yet) AFAIK.

kotaKat 4mo ago

I'd pivot over to the MANET folks (https://openmanet.net/ 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/ https://persistentsystems.com/mpu5/)

rta5 4mo ago

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.

WhyNotHugo 4mo ago
Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.
brk 4mo ago
I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience. Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing. It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.
- MiracleRabbit 4mo ago
  For sensor stuff use LoRaWAN + Mirotik Basestation + Chirpstack
MiracleRabbit 4mo ago
All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters. Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)

LelouBil 4mo ago

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.

itomato 4mo ago

Meshtastic and MQTT are part of my home network https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/ https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/

kgwxd 4mo ago

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.

pseudopolous 4mo ago

[flagged]

xrd 4mo ago

Really interesting to see that the ham radio spectrum prohibits encryption.

zuzululu 4mo ago

I think this is a great movement. I'm also concerned that this is going to be certainly popular with criminals. So there's always this cat and mouse game with new technology like this. I don't know enough about the technology behind this to speculate further.