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.
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?
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
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
