We're using Meshtastic quite extensively for communication on our boat. Each crew member carries a mobile waterproof node (Seeed T1000e), the boat itself has a node, and we also have a Meshtastic tracker for the dinghy.
We often sail in places where there's no communication infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive. With Meshtastic we can talk when somebody goes ashore, and the boat can send telemetry and alerts to the remote crew.
Some of our buddy boats also have Meshtastic on board so we can text chat with them instead of using VHF.
The only real problem I foresee with this use(fantastic use case btw) is if you travel across regions, does the kit currently get automatically switched to correct frequencies and power limits?
No, you need to switch the region manually. Not a big deal to do for a couple of nodes.
The trickier part is to figure out the correct preset for more exotic locations. I've had to ask a couple of times from the local Meshtastic community group.
I have a few LoRa radios running Meshtastic and they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't rely on them in a critical situation. It's too easy to accidentally configure a node incorrectly and cause problems for nearby nodes.
Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of the options were managed dynamically by the software itself, things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network utilization and previous transmission success rate, or automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh toplolgy, that sort of thing.
We need better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life, distance, and/or bandwidth with a simplified interface. There's no sense wasting spectrum or having malfunctioning radio gear when it can be standardized and used more efficiently without an artificial, protectionist, hoarding monopoly (excluding particular essential, prioritized uses).
Proprietary mesh networks tend to become unusable garbage because they omit DoS, rate limits, and proper configuration for dense metropolitan uses, and tend to fail at investing in upkeep.
> better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life, distance, and/or bandwidth
That would certainly be helpful, but even with current radios I can imagine a configuration process that sequentially scans different channels to achieve the same result, just a little slower.
Huge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum ecosystem:
Didn't got adoption because the code base is awful to work with and there is a trauma against bluetooth being used as a network path.
Plus: encryption is heavy when bandwidth is limited and over radio waves we aren't even permitted to encrypt data most of the times.
Please don't read my comment as bringing down the project. I'm a fan, used everything it was produced but ultimately is unusable for serious applications on the current state. I really tried hard to adopt it.
What are those gripes? If I don't have anyone else who would use it, but would hang out in a public chat room, it didn't seem like reticulum was the right choice for that? You need destinations on things?
It seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems the chances of only getting half the messages is very high. It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff seems unreliable.
It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.
Nomadnet it's really bad; it doesn't properly work with a 80x24 terminal and 16 colors.
Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some rework.
Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays.
And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks, (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and portability. But, please, no BubbleTea unless you can be sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an option.
One of the main differences with MeshCore is that client nodes don't repeat messages, only dedicated repeater nodes repeat with the idea that they should be placed in more ideal locations.
Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
> Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as well on their discord with no threats of banning or anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but that tone was overly harsh'.
Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and saving everything, including public channels, direct messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's, since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything. And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were effectively encrypted by the same shared key.
Normally there was a general expectation that the data was ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data problem by saving and making available everything sent to MQTT.
Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5 introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage.
Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything like a mesh.
It seems that at scale meshcore is much better. The more nodes you get, the worst it gets with Meshtastic after a certain point. For meshcore you now have entire regions connected in a single mesh with hundreds of nodes.
Meshtastic: Text message mesh network using LoRa modems.
Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic. Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio.
Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell and file copy).
First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.
Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.
How far can Meshtastic go, it seems using LoRA. How is it different from VHF/UHF based radio that can do 30+ miles using handheld where no cellular power exists(off-grid communication), or the 5-mile walkie-talkie. My assumption is that Meshtastic has the advantage of low-power that can sustain much longer time.
Another forthcoming alternative will be satellite-based chat using phones.
For a single hop you can expect close to similar ranges as a VHF set. We saw 30NM distances on open sea when leaving Curaçao. Could be a lot more with antenna situated high up.
Where the magic potentially kicks in is the mesh hops. With those you can reach much further by jumping from one node to another.
It's not even close to satellite comms in reach or reliability, but it also requires no infrastructure, no licensing, and no subscriptions.
Meshtastic is multi-hop, doesn’t require a license and is encrypted by default. It’s also a toy network, really. Reliability doesn’t seem to be high on the priority list.
Meshtastic is interesting because it's basically "LoRa-first networking" instead of "internet with some radios attached." Most consumer radios are still stuck in the mental model of walkie-talkies, while Meshtastic treats RF as an IP-like transport layer you can script, automate, and extend. That flips the stack: your primary network can be intermittent, off-grid, and low bandwidth, and the internet becomes an optional upgrade instead of a dependency.
The bigger story is that this is what "local-first" looks like in the physical world. Phones are powerful computers that are useless as soon as the tower or backhaul goes down; a $20 LoRa board suddenly becomes the only reliable "infrastructure" in range. Once enough people carry something Meshtastic-compatible, you get the weird inversion where the cheapest, dumbest devices are the ones that keep working when the expensive, smart ones don't.
And not even the ones who carry them, just a half dozen well-placed reliably powered router nodes can massively increase the range of the network in general.
You can get plug&play ones from seeedstudio for $100-ish, solar panels and batteries included.
For the last 2-3 years I've been "this close" to getting a few devices and setting up a repeater node on my home roof and my office roof, and one to play with... I love the idea of bringing an alternative to SMS to my area. But at the end of the day, is anyone actually using it for anything?
This community is laughably caustic and abusive. My friend attempted to create a simple tutorial site and their org harassed him for over a year. He didn't even mention the word "meshtastic" and they made dozens of false trademark claims that his site could be "confused" with an official site.
I was previously a fan, but I'd never seen behavior like that from an "open source" project.
You’re understating it. Meshtastic is horribly designed. If you designed a wireless mesh network making all the worst possible choices, with the most shortsighted design decisions imaginable, you’d get something a little better than Meshtastic.
We're using Meshtastic quite extensively for communication on our boat. Each crew member carries a mobile waterproof node (Seeed T1000e), the boat itself has a node, and we also have a Meshtastic tracker for the dinghy.
We often sail in places where there's no communication infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive. With Meshtastic we can talk when somebody goes ashore, and the boat can send telemetry and alerts to the remote crew.
Some of our buddy boats also have Meshtastic on board so we can text chat with them instead of using VHF.
Here's a story describing this: https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...
The only real problem I foresee with this use(fantastic use case btw) is if you travel across regions, does the kit currently get automatically switched to correct frequencies and power limits?
No, you need to switch the region manually. Not a big deal to do for a couple of nodes.
The trickier part is to figure out the correct preset for more exotic locations. I've had to ask a couple of times from the local Meshtastic community group.
I have a few LoRa radios running Meshtastic and they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't rely on them in a critical situation. It's too easy to accidentally configure a node incorrectly and cause problems for nearby nodes.
Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of the options were managed dynamically by the software itself, things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network utilization and previous transmission success rate, or automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh toplolgy, that sort of thing.
We need better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life, distance, and/or bandwidth with a simplified interface. There's no sense wasting spectrum or having malfunctioning radio gear when it can be standardized and used more efficiently without an artificial, protectionist, hoarding monopoly (excluding particular essential, prioritized uses).
Proprietary mesh networks tend to become unusable garbage because they omit DoS, rate limits, and proper configuration for dense metropolitan uses, and tend to fail at investing in upkeep.
> better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life, distance, and/or bandwidth
That would certainly be helpful, but even with current radios I can imagine a configuration process that sequentially scans different channels to achieve the same result, just a little slower.
regional meshes may have suggested configuration. for example bay area mesh https://bayme.sh/docs/getting-started/recommended-settings/
i installed a node week ago. honestly, it is somewhat underwhelming
If you're underwhelmed (in the Bay Area?) imagine how underwhelming it has been in Omaha, Nebraska, ha ha.
I played a bit with them. There was one node anyway about 6 miles from me.
Alternatively…
https://reticulum.network/
Huge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum ecosystem:
- Sideband: iOS/Android chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband)
- NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet)
- Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware (https://unsigned.io/rnode/)
Didn't got adoption because the code base is awful to work with and there is a trauma against bluetooth being used as a network path.
Plus: encryption is heavy when bandwidth is limited and over radio waves we aren't even permitted to encrypt data most of the times.
Please don't read my comment as bringing down the project. I'm a fan, used everything it was produced but ultimately is unusable for serious applications on the current state. I really tried hard to adopt it.
What are those gripes? If I don't have anyone else who would use it, but would hang out in a public chat room, it didn't seem like reticulum was the right choice for that? You need destinations on things?
We have a relatively dense meshtastic in my city, and yet I can't reliably send a message across to my friend, who would be 4 hops away.
It's just not awesome. Especially compared to what you can do with ham radio.
You must live in nyc or san Francisco lol
Boise, actually.
It’s pretty dense in Portland and Seattle too, I’d image most of the bigger cities have a fairly large net
It seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems the chances of only getting half the messages is very high. It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff seems unreliable.
It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.
Nomadnet it's really bad; it doesn't properly work with a 80x24 terminal and 16 colors.
Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some rework. Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays.
And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks, (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and portability. But, please, no BubbleTea unless you can be sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an option.
Meshcore is another alternative. I haven't done a deep dive into either but have heard that they both fix some Meshtastic issues.
https://meshcore.co.uk/
One of the main differences with MeshCore is that client nodes don't repeat messages, only dedicated repeater nodes repeat with the idea that they should be placed in more ideal locations.
Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
Sad to see open source communities being so insecure that they feel threatened by an alternative project. Both can coexist and competition is good.
The Meshtastic community is almost as toxic as the ham radio one.
MeshCore app is way better than the Meshtastic one.
> Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as well on their discord with no threats of banning or anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but that tone was overly harsh'.
Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and saving everything, including public channels, direct messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's, since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything. And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were effectively encrypted by the same shared key.
Normally there was a general expectation that the data was ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data problem by saving and making available everything sent to MQTT.
Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5 introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage.
Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything like a mesh.
It seems that at scale meshcore is much better. The more nodes you get, the worst it gets with Meshtastic after a certain point. For meshcore you now have entire regions connected in a single mesh with hundreds of nodes.
Meshtastic: Text message mesh network using LoRa modems.
Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic. Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio.
Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell and file copy).
Exactly my thoughts. Reticulum feels like an eternal "one day will be great" project but we keep waiting and waiting.
Reticulum and Nomadnet should have been rewritten in Golang long ago.
reticulum cannot scale, it's not topology aware and has no congestion management
First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.
Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.
How far can Meshtastic go, it seems using LoRA. How is it different from VHF/UHF based radio that can do 30+ miles using handheld where no cellular power exists(off-grid communication), or the 5-mile walkie-talkie. My assumption is that Meshtastic has the advantage of low-power that can sustain much longer time.
Another forthcoming alternative will be satellite-based chat using phones.
For a single hop you can expect close to similar ranges as a VHF set. We saw 30NM distances on open sea when leaving Curaçao. Could be a lot more with antenna situated high up.
Where the magic potentially kicks in is the mesh hops. With those you can reach much further by jumping from one node to another.
It's not even close to satellite comms in reach or reliability, but it also requires no infrastructure, no licensing, and no subscriptions.
Meshtastic is multi-hop, doesn’t require a license and is encrypted by default. It’s also a toy network, really. Reliability doesn’t seem to be high on the priority list.
Popular in:
2024 (335 points, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448
2022 (249 points, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142
2020 (620 points, 168 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242091 - Aug 2024 (16 comments)
Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)
Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142 - July 2022 (88 comments)
We're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would like advice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066 - March 2020 (166 comments)
Yea ppl know it but why not post again a very fun open project.
Here is part of the Berlin mesh https://potatomesh.net/
Wow Freifunk on the Teufelsberg, what a great twist of faith or whatshouldicallit :D
Meshtastic is interesting because it's basically "LoRa-first networking" instead of "internet with some radios attached." Most consumer radios are still stuck in the mental model of walkie-talkies, while Meshtastic treats RF as an IP-like transport layer you can script, automate, and extend. That flips the stack: your primary network can be intermittent, off-grid, and low bandwidth, and the internet becomes an optional upgrade instead of a dependency.
The bigger story is that this is what "local-first" looks like in the physical world. Phones are powerful computers that are useless as soon as the tower or backhaul goes down; a $20 LoRa board suddenly becomes the only reliable "infrastructure" in range. Once enough people carry something Meshtastic-compatible, you get the weird inversion where the cheapest, dumbest devices are the ones that keep working when the expensive, smart ones don't.
And not even the ones who carry them, just a half dozen well-placed reliably powered router nodes can massively increase the range of the network in general.
You can get plug&play ones from seeedstudio for $100-ish, solar panels and batteries included.
For the last 2-3 years I've been "this close" to getting a few devices and setting up a repeater node on my home roof and my office roof, and one to play with... I love the idea of bringing an alternative to SMS to my area. But at the end of the day, is anyone actually using it for anything?
In my experience, no, but still worth doing.
You end up finding and chatting (often off-mesh!) with people who are within Lora-mesh-distance of you, who have similar interests.
Some of the official city supported emergency preparedness groups use it in my city. I would say it is largely a curiosity for me, like ham radio.
Been more fun to take it camping and stuff to play around with with friends.
Want to try and send one up in an RC plane soon.
This community is laughably caustic and abusive. My friend attempted to create a simple tutorial site and their org harassed him for over a year. He didn't even mention the word "meshtastic" and they made dozens of false trademark claims that his site could be "confused" with an official site.
I was previously a fan, but I'd never seen behavior like that from an "open source" project.
One thing to keep in mind is that it's not even a very good mesh network.
There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical review of meshtastic. Or find my comments on meshtastic here.
If anything they showed there's demand for a public mesh. Unfortunately, they didn't want to learn from AlohaNet or any of the other meshes.
You’re understating it. Meshtastic is horribly designed. If you designed a wireless mesh network making all the worst possible choices, with the most shortsighted design decisions imaginable, you’d get something a little better than Meshtastic.
[flagged]
Heh, that isn't my experience.
I created a client Linux: https://gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-meshtastic-client and even posted it on their discussion page: https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99 . One of the maintainers responded positively to me: https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99#discussion... .
Meshtastic is a terrible project with some of the most toxic terrible people running it.
If they had any human emotions they would feel shame for how they treat the community.
But instead they’re tiny corporations cosplaying as human.
Meshtastic