Meshtastic: Off-Grid Mesh Communication Network

Meshcore is currently considered superior in most respects to Meshtastic, and as a result has a faster growing user base.

https://meshcore.co.uk/

Long, long time ago, we used the finger command for communication, still works and without the need of any extern app. Works by default in all Unix like systems (Windows, Mac), in some Linux distros needs to be installed, if it isn't already implemented.

You can use happynetbox to create an handle

Example

Open console and write finger zerush@happynetbox.com

I know its not the same, but i find the concept alot more well implemented And personally been having fun with it as its more than LoRa and Ethernet.

Rnode is the equivalent

https://reticulum.network/

I'm really curious about this stuff. What is the easiest way to try it out?

I've been experimenting with Meshtastic for about a year now, and I love it! It's currently my backup comms plan for my wife, as well as a few friends and family.

Although, I am putting more of my hopes into the reticulum network, with the hopes that it grows in the future.

Meshtastic is cool! Just wish there were people in my area

Reticulum incorporates much of what meshtastic already does but with redundancies that are going to prove useful under an authoritarian regime. I would point people to reticulum instead of meshtastic.

Just got my heltec v4 in the mail and the meshtastic web flasher isn't working for some reason. It has never had an issue flashing any of my v3s in the past. Maybe the newness of the hardware makes setup a bit more fiddly since I'm sure my usb c cable is a data cables.

The meshtastic sadly makes implementation of a signal protocol almost impossible. I just wish we didn't need to have static single PSKs for secure comms over it.

Meshtastic is nice. I have one node already, debating myself if that's enough or if I should get/build a solar node.

I was very fortunate that there's an active community in my city. I can reach nodes 50km away without a big antenna.

Have a node up in the attic which is bridged to my wifi and into my Matrix server. Of course, in the event of a catastrophe the usage will be direct bluetooth connection from a phone instead.

The range is impressive, my node connects to others several tens of kilometers away.

Is there som rough map of where this stuff exist?

This will be fantastic during the apocalypse and we lose Internet.
Too bad I'll have lost the Internet so I won't be able to learn how to get the equipment and set it up, until it's too late

We see "-tastic" used as a suffix so often that it seems genuinely odd to see it explicitly explained.

What do you plan to do with it?

I've looked into Meshtastic, I have a pair of nodes. I am solidly not impressed.

I live in a wooded area, I can shout farther than the range of these nodes. It's hilariously pathetic. Yes I know people who live on mountaintops can hear the gods themselves on this thing but in the forest the RF spectrum ends at 300MHz. The U in UHF stands for USELESS. So unless you're in the room with someone else who has a node, the experience of using it is turning on MQTT and only making contacts that way. Which means you've bought a badly made low power radio to connect your phone to itself.

The software is pretty bad, too. It's got a lot of the standard FOSS defects, there's a LOT of features that are about 1/3 of the way implemented and the feature set is different from platform to platform. On the Android app, you can "reply" to someone else's message, almost like conversation threading. On the web UI, that feature isn't supported so the message just comes through with less context. There's emoji reactions! On the mobile app, you can see someone has reacted with an emoji to your message. There's no way to see who, because if you tap on the emoji you'll respond with the same emoji, so the identity of your contact will just be a mystery forever. On the web UI, reactions aren't a thing, and it looks like someone posts a message with a single emoji in it. So you can tell who posted it, but without the context as to why.

There's a range test function that sets a node to kind of an automatic beacon, so you can take another for a walk or drive and see just how truly pathetic the range is, and your mobile node will store its GPS coordinates...forever. They made it able to store it as a file but did not provide the ability to erase it.

There's like five ways of interfacing with the microcontroller's GPIO or serial bus to attach external hardware, each more convoluted and limiting than the last. Oh, and if you want to do some like remote telemetry or control across the mesh, I hope you like spamming everybody, because even though it has the concept of private channels, you're not allowed to use any of them. Almost all automated messaging is forced into the Primary channel.

The only thing I can see that recommends Meshtastic over Meshcore or Reticulum is it's relatively easy to get two nodes talking to each other on Meshtastic, you've just got to make sure like 40 settings match on two devices.

You saw that post of the guy on the bus as well then?

Fun if you are travelling and go to a new town/city with an active user base.

That reminds me, I want to get some walkie talkies for my kids. There may be loRa walkie talkies maybe?

Meshtastic is cool, I haven't gotten into it. It's all license free. I say that because some other radio based hobbies need a license (GMRS and ham).

Folks looking into it, many of the devices use Bluetooth to communicate with a phone or computer so you don't need to type messages directly on the device, but the technology is still off grid. There are totally self contained devices you can type on directly. I just wanted to mention that because seeing "off grid" then seeing them pairing with phones can be confusing. It's truly only to enter messages and keep devices a little cheaper and easier to use.