Meshtastic is a mesh network for radio communications or something. I’m curious to hear from people who’ve used it as to what their experience was like.
Pretty busy in my area. I have two radios, one that stays home and one that I bring places. I find it cool that i can see messages from north LA county here in San Diego that are all routed thru a single node someone put out on the coast of Orange County.
Most of the time the chat is just “good morning” etc. During wildfires though I do see local “reporting” of fire progress and first responder presence.
Occasionally people report ICE presence which is kind of cool.
We built a fancy solar node with a big giant antenna and put it on top the local library, but something’s not working with it… Still trying to get it right. It seems like there are plenty of nodes around, if we can just get it working
Where can I learn more than what the wiki gives? Maybe a DIY guide on how to get started.
I don’t know, but that seems like a good question for !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Fairly talkative but you only see half the convos most of the time.
typical long range convo… “hello”, “who are you”, “what’s happening”, “what is my signal strength”, “goodbye”
Its for fun. :)
Never used it but I bet 50% of the messages are “test”
Or “🔔 Alert Bell Character!”
I saw no messages for a long time, then saw a couple when I moved the radio to the other side of the room, and a lot more when I brought it with me to a more populated city.
Works pretty well in my area, though not so much wherever there’s a ridge and no node to help propagate the network over it. There’s a few slivers of town without coverage, but there’s a very large, multistate group of enthusiasts expanding the infrastructure.
Some have also left Meshtastic entirely, in favor of Meshcore. I might try it on my spare T Deck just to see. But Meshtastic is fun, especially if you enjoy the potential for tinkering with things. I had a blast going through the thread of putting MT on some Chatter2.0s, along with some mods to the boards. Now they’re like little mesh Nokias, ringtones and all!
What’s the difference between Mestastic and Meshcore?
To expand on what others have said:
Meshtastic:
Has more users
Has really good info on traceroutes, historical details on signal strength, etc…MeshCore:
Messages often get recieved because of a better* algorithm (much higher hop limit). Chat feature makes a node into a chatroom. Messages get saved and anyone logging in can see messages.
Both are good. I wish they did more work interop TBH. But both are in their early days. reticulum is also another protocol in the space. Much harder to set up but actually is more like everyone things of a mesh network (websites are hosted/viewed via multiple ways).
Ive worked and contributed to both mesh projects. They have VERY similar hardware so its really just differences between what you want to play around with. In an actual emergency though…walkie talkies are MUCH better (as well as ARPA).
!meshtastic@mander.xyz is where we hang out.
I don’t know the specifics, but I know it’s another option in LORA comms. Works with much of the same equipment as Meshtastic. It has a different way of handling messages that does seem to handle congestion better than busy/uncoordinated areas of Meshtastic networks.
I personally am not as interested in it bc of the lack of node options compared to MT, and parts of it are proprietary. Some admin features also seem to be paywalled in one of the primary app options. Iirc android has a few other app options for node companionship
I bought a t1000e “tracker” hoping that I could use it to track my bike if it got stolen. Well despite it being called a tracker and having a mode called “tracker” it doesn’t really work as a tracker. It turns out it’s really more of an external radio for my cellphone. It gets me onto kind of a city wide chat channel. Nice but not what I was after.
The really frustrating part is that I think the network and the devices can support a decent tracker …but it’ll take the right combination of dozens of confusing settings. I gave up after about two months of trying various combinations. I even went to a meshtastic club meeting but everyone there agreed that my tracker would not really… track. Sigh.
Just one guy’s opinion and with just a singular goal. If you’re into Ham radio or like the idea of low power radio chirping communicating across great distances… then jump right in.
It works, but I live in a not very dense area so I have 0 connections a lot of the time. It was pretty cool when someone on an airliner had a device and they flew overhead because suddenly there were like 20 people connected. Sort of like a satellite
Small local group, not very chatty.
