Meshtastic

If you dont use the default LongFast meshtastic is really empty. I switched my node to MediumSlow, since it's like 86% faster than LongFast. I knew there would not be any in my area, so I subscribed to the msh/US MQTT topic and theres still nobody else. I'm going to leave it like that for a while and see if I hear anything during any kind of band openings or catch any other MQTT nodes trying out that topic. And yes, both uplink and downlink are enabled. I do know that there are some nodes in the Bay Area on msh/US/mqtt-bayme-sh, but I am not near their.

I’ve recently come across this awesome project and have been doing a whole lot of research but there are still some questions lingering that im hoping could be cleared up by the community.

1. How safe is the encryption? Do two nodes upon initialization exchange public keys and then stored on the individual devices indefinitely? What happens if one of the nodes needs to factory reset and generate new keys. Will it let the other side know that the keys have been manipulated and require for a renegotiation to happen?
2. Is the concept of a multiple node chat/group chat possible? If not currently is it someone thing could become possible in the future?
3. voice chat; ive seen some hardware mentioning voice chat, has anyone tried this and could it be a replacement for gmrs radios with the added benefit of license free repeaters?

Thanks!

I'm trying to get my home node high enough for LOS to other parts of town. The house unfortunately has a full hip roof, so I can't attach anything without going through the shingles. My current setup is a pole attached to an 8' garden fence. That gets me to about 15' AGL.

Based on the homes around me I need at least 30' of height to clear their roofs. I've given up on trying to get above the trees because they're old Oaks 50'-100' high.

I keep seeing collapsing fiberglass poles online but they're advertised as a temporary setup. Anyone have recommendations for at least a semi-permanent pole or small tower?

I just started using this so I know very little.

From what I gather, there's a default channel called "LongFast" which every device has from the start. I can see some messages in "LongFast" where I am.

I can see I can create another channel and share it via link, QR, etc.

Do people make such channels and share them publicly, for say local or topical chat groups? E.g. "Canada", or "Meshtastic Support", "BurningTesla", or "Cats"? Is this a thing? Can it be a things?

When I check local groups info, I see links to online comms like Telegram (ew), Discord, Matrix, etc. I don't see Meshtastic channel links.

So, I'm scratching my head, and hoping someone here can help, or have had a similar experience?

I live at 500msl in a small rural town of about 300 people. Started experimenting about a month ago and have a few T1000-E's and a station g2. The waterproof enclosure I ordered for the g2 finally arrived a few days ago and it's now up on a modest pole attached to my house (about 4m high), signal is much better and we only have 3 regular members of our mesh at this stage (still testing before advertising to locals).

Even before raising the g2, we'd had a few times when a couple of nodes would appear for a few hours in the early hours of the morning. We are in an area popular with hiking and 4wders so this isn't particularly unlikely especially as these are given as ideal use cases for Meshtastic, and sometimes people do get up early for this kind of thing!

But last night, we had an absolute explosion of nodes in the early hours. All had gps locations of around a very specific area on the coast, approximately 180km away as the crow flies. I think one or two of them had been seen before but I'd wiped my nodeDB a few times since then so not completely sure.

The similarity to previous times when we saw a few nodes in early hours, but many more (with g2 higher, makes sense regardless of how), makes me wonder now if something atmospheric is happening.

Could this be tropospheric ducting? If so has anyone managed to actually communicate with this kind of connection over MT?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation

I've been taking CERT disaster relief (DR) classes, put on by the city at the local fire department (we live in an area prone to earthquake, flood, and fire). The subject of communications came up and they mentioned walkie talkies in neighborhood caches, but nobody had any idea about models, ranges, etc.

Been casually looking at Meshtastic and keep seeing it mentioned for DR, but haven't come across any actual guides or implementations. For example, I can set up a router in my house, but there's no guarantee it will be standing during a fire, or if power will remain during an earthquake.

There are lots of questions (tech, redundancy, battery backups, range, node placement, while on-the-move, temporary setups, gateways to cell and cloud, etc). Was hoping someone had already figured it out so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. This would be first for my own neighborhood, then expand to city or county-wide services.

I've got another CERT class coming up next week and will ask the Fire Department folks for tips/advice as well, but thought I'd ask here about Meshtastic and maybe point them at some resources, if asked.

For research, am making my way through posts on the Meshtastic site and read the Burning Man report. Also checked out Meshmap in my area (only two routers, one on top of a mountain, but possibly on the back side of it).

FWIW, background in tech, have a ton of ESP32s, RPis, and a few LoRa boards sitting around. Was looking at getting the T-Deck, but am going to hold off until I have a proper plan on what to do with it. Also want to document the process so hopefully come up with a reusable plan. Mainly looking for tips where to look next. TIA.

So I have been using Meshtastic for a bit over a month now, and I've been hearing about MeshCore, which sounds interesting, although it's much smaller. Tonight, I decided to give it a test, and while there's nobody around me who I can test with, my initial impressions of the firmware is that it's early, but good. With that said, from everything I can tell, the applications to control it from Android and iOS do not appear to be open source. And I absolutely refuse to become interested in something that is not open source. So that's a big no-no for me. If I am wrong, I would definitely be willing to try it again. But if I am right, the only way I would consider using it is if somebody else writes an app that is open source.

Just got a new case for my v3 and now all it is doing is going through a power cycle loop showing the splash screen and nothing more. Pulled the battery and tried only USB power but same result.

Has anyone seen this issue? Running the current beta firmware and it was working fine for a few weeks so i doubt it's a SW issue.

Just out of curiosity and inspired by a previous post here, i ordered two XIAO ESP32S3 - Wio-SX1262 Kits and a SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E.

I dont expect much if any nodes in the area around so the plan is to put one ESP+SX1262 up as a Router to the Internet (if this is the correct wording). The other one can be a sensor later on but first i want to test out the GPS tracking around the area (countryside).

As the SX1262 only comes with a small antenna, i thought about getting a used big (like 6dbi) Helium antenna for cheap to increase the range of the Router.

Whould this be an acceptable setup to start with, or just stupid? (especially the antenna and Router Part?)

Hey everyone!

There is an Open Source PCB for making DIY Mesh node with NRF52840 + RA-62 called FakeTec supported by community

Can i wonder if someone done same, but for combine NRF52840 + E22 (Like E22-400M30S or such) ? Or can help with developing? 30\33dB more powerful and still usable in many place's of the world

Thanks :)

Reference: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/#presets

What does the link budget, expressed in dB, actually refer to?

Does that mean I can expect to have a usable signal down to the RSSI listed as the link budget? e.g. LongFast will be usable down to -153 dB RSSI where ShortFast will need a received signal strength of at least -143 dB?

I'm debating on whether to deploy my mesh in LongFast mode (default) or ShortFast. I've received advice that, in the wild, ShortFast has "close enough" range to LongFast but with the benefits of being roughly 10x faster and reducing the airtime per client (which produces other benefits). They said terrain, height, and line-of-sight are more critical factors (which makes sense).

Looking at the link budget table, there's also a 10dB difference between ShortFast and LongFast. I do know that the decibel scale is logarithmic, so that difference is fairly significant.

Basically, I need to make sure I'm understanding link budgets correctly so I can put the proper values into the site planner.

My home node made contact with what I think was someone flying by with a RAK module. The GPS put it at a distance of 47 miles and height of 36,000 feet, along the path airlines would take from New Orleans to Houston.

I've had contacts with more distant nodes but this one was able to confirm receipt and I got a valid traceroute back.

So I live in a small city of around 50,000 people and we have a router that's 200 feet up on a tower with a 5.8 DBI antenna.

There's a guy 17.5 miles away who wants to get into the mesh and his node is on a 30-foot flagpole and also has a 5.8 DBI antenna.

There is no major elevation change between the two nodes and according to a distance calculator, the line of sight between both antennas should be about 24 miles, which would cover the distance with no problem.

With that said, the nodes are not connecting together. And I'm wondering if that's because of the 5.8 DBI antenna gain on both sides, or if there's something else I might be missing.

Edit: On a side note, I live 3.7 miles from the router, and it has trouble hearing me, but I do not have trouble hearing it with my T1000E. And I'm also wondering if that's because of the antenna gain on the router side.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/8901368

Switched to a new case design and, for once, kept the mini 2 dB whip antenna that came with the board -- all my other nodes have an SMA connector with 5, 6, and (supposedly) 10 dB antennas. Has a 2000 mAh li-po inside. Quarter for scale.

Forgive the shoddy print: I'm still tuning my 3D printer. My larger cases turned out great, but this smaller one warped like crazy Will hopefully have a better print of that case soon. I don't have any red filament, but I'm probably going to paint the buttons red to give it a ThinkPad motif.

Edit: For anyone curious, the case is the Alley Chat HT Pocket designed for the Heltec V3 board. There's two variants: one with an opening for an SMA connector and one without.

https://www.printables.com/model/920722-heltec-lora-32-v3-ht-pocket-case-by-alley-cat

Alright meshers, I've been playing around with meshtastic for some time now and I've ended up with a good number of devices. I'm mostly in the rakwireless boat, with a pair of heltecs.

I have two RP2040 (rak11310) units that I just can't come up with a good use for. They use less power than a heltec on full blast, but don't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. If you disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on the heltec and turn on power saving, the heltec ends up using less power for what I can see as the same capabilities as the RP2040.

So, what can I put these units to use for? The processor is definitely more powerful than the NRF52 boards, but meshtastic doesn't seem to need any more than the NRF52 has to offer. With power saving, the heltecs can perform equally well with less power, while also having a more powerful processor in case it's needed.

Update: Seems there is already a project for that: https://github.com/landandair/RNS_Over_Meshtastic

The main problem with that is that the default/most common Meshtastic config, LongFast is not recommended (that's what my nodes would be using) and even using the ShortTurbo profile would be far slower than using an RNode due to the encapsulation. However, it is possible.

I would assume running RNS over Meshtastic via serial module would have similar (or possibly even worse) performance restrictions, so that may be as far as I take this experiment.

Update 2: Chatted a bit with the dev of that project, and they recommend ShortFast which nets about 500 bytes/s over RNS.

Original Post

I've been looking at both Reticulum (specifically the RNodes) and Meshtastic for an off-grid, disaster-resistant network. There are pros and cons of each, but I've been leaning toward Meshtastic due to ease of use for end users since the mobile app is much more polished and straightforward with less of a learning curve.

That said, Reticulum is pretty versatile and can run over pretty much anything (even two tin cans and a string with the right interface to your PC lol). So my hope is that by setting up a serial channel in Meshtastic, I can use that as the underlying network and run Reticulum on top. The Reticulum network would be free to expand independently of the Meshtastic network, but that's fine. The goal is just to not have two independent LoRa networks and letting the "default" one be the more user-friendly of the two.

TL;DR: I am curious if it would be possible, or if anyone has tried, to link two Reticulum endpoints over Meshtastic via its serial module. Essentially, Reticulum as an OTT service with Meshtastic providing the lower layer.

Reference: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/module/serial/

I haven't gotten far enough in to begin playing with Meshtastic's serial mode, so mostly just asking for second opinions or if anyone has tried something like this.

Knowledge Gaps / Things that I am unsure of:

• Reticulum has a minimum MTU requirement of 500 bytes. I'm not sure if this applies to the serial connection or just packet-based transports. I'm assuming any link since there is no MTU concept for a serial connection.
• Does Meshtastic transparently fragment and reassemble data sent over its serial channel, or is it limited to ~200 characters at a time like the text messaging app?
• Can Reticulum work with multiple endpoints sharing the same serial bus, or would it expect a 1:1 link for serial connections?
  • If it does expect 1:1, is that just due to lack of CSMA/CD on the serial link? If so, would the underlying Meshtastic link address that since it already does that for the LoRa radio?

Eventually, I am going to try a test setup, but before I get to that, I guess I'm just asking around to save myself the trouble if someone else has already tried with / without success.

Edit: Added an image so these will roll up as a crosspost.

I’d like to have one at two physical locations, best I can do is a window and a third on me to actually message from. Hope to get sensor data from the two stations and have all three in client mode.

Is that good, bad, whatever!?

What are you doing these days in your local area?

I just setup a Heltec v3, I set the region, I can see 9 other nodes, but I cannot send or receive messages. I searched the internet to not find anything helpful.

Anyone have Ideas? I have none.

Solved: I went outside! Messages to channel 0 show acknowledged!

Got my first two devices on tuesday and I've been traveling around with them! Seems the t114 has much better range but is a less convenient package of course (and damn amazon didn't ship my GPS module, so now that is on the way with an upgraded antenna and a heltec v3 cause why not?)

I've been able to make a few connections, but I had a couple questions about some of them.

I've been able to connect to a few nodes around town, even got one reply, but there seems to be two categories of nodes, some "recognized" and some "unrecognized." Does anyone know why that could be? Can I still talk to them if they're unrecognized, and/or do they still route packets? Can I fix that or do the other nodes' owners have to?

Glad I finally got into it, been having fun and apparently my area has some activity (even if I'm in a deadzone at the bottom of a hill for now.)

Edit: Ok I keep forgetting about redlib so I think I don't have access to Ye Olde Country because VPN and I refuse all apps, but I just remembered and searched there! So if anyone else has this question like me it seems that:

Simply not enought packets have arrived to get that info

No nodeinfo received. Either wait longer or request user info manually.

And

These appear to be running an older version of the meshtastic firmware [pre-2.5] which likely do not have an updated public key.

I've been brainstorming ways to get a permanent node on my truck for various reasons. Here's what I have so far:

• Hard-wired for power. The vehicle battery is pretty large, and I have a solar-maintainer installed with enough power left over to run a node.
• GPS module for tracking
• External antenna (915 MHz). I already have cargo racks on the truck bed so plenty of space to attach a mount.

Unfortunately I haven't found much in the way of hardware guides. Initially I figured a 33 cm ham antenna would be perfect but haven't seen much available. For the node itself I was looking at either a heltec tracker or a Wisblock with location module. Anyone suggestions?