Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

jonaharagon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 152 posts

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#131

Post by m4rtink »

PaulHoule wrote: post #110
giwook wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you need 200 miles of range for?

Personally I find it very satisfying to get long near-line-of-site performance in VHF and up. That could be reaching a repeater 100+ miles away on two meters with a handheld and a tape measure yagi https://www.jpole-antenna.com/2017/02/07/build-it-2-meter-ta... or talking to somebody with a bigger station 300+ miles away because of a tropospheric duct or just getting into the WiFi at the hospital from the other side…

While the local Czech MeshCore network is heavily supported by a couple repeaters on higher hills and mountains to connect the meshes around metropolitan centers, ideally it should be much more distributed and less dependent on such a few important nodes.

Basically a lot more repeaters & more hops to reach longer distances.

This also helps with scaling as more messages can be routed local only via MeshCore region support scoping, effectively using the available bandwidth on many places for different purposes at the same time.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#132

Post by m4rtink »

mschuster91 wrote: post #118
bityard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out

The problem is that takes up valuable airtime. The denser the mesh the more airtime is wasted on the junk.

In MeshCore a concept of regions has been recently introduced - you can scope channels and messages to a specific geographic region (which is set on a repeater) and it will not propagate outside of the given region.

That way local channels don't need to flood the whole mesh, same as with trying to send a message to someone or reach the management interface of a repeater you know is in a given area.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#133

Post by pelotron »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #120
wtallis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The request was for "a proper, working emergency meshing standard". Ham radio absolutely is not that . Yes, ham radios are used in emergency situations, but usually not as a mesh and certainly not as a standard.

“Mesh” doesn’t even make sense wrt ham. Aren’t hams just people broadcasting voice with amplitude modulation? Is there a data band? If so, are any hams willing to relay?

No, yes, and yes.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#134

Post by pelotron »

bergie wrote: post #60
Groxx wrote: post #3

> To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post. Yeah, that's the general feel I get every time I poke into Mesh*. Neat radio tech, fun toy to find other nearby nerds, instantly-obvious problems that are fatal to growing beyond being that…

I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.

Now we're talking.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#135

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

kanbankaren wrote: post #124
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #72

I’ve looked at this stuff, because of its utility as an emergency communication system. I’m not sure if any of the open standards are there yet, but that may just be, because there isn’t money to be made, so no commercial entity has approached it (like GoTenna, which appears to be the only successful one, but uses a proprietary protocol).

For emergency comms(remember, emergency services provided by the state don't monitor the ham bands, so can't call them), a $20 ham radio would work or just carry FRS radios. FCC does allow use of a ham radio in a real emergency without a license.

I was thinking more along the lines of an organized S&R team.

They would probably need some robust, non-problematic kit that could work in any environment.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#136

Post by tardedmeme »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #120
wtallis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The request was for "a proper, working emergency meshing standard". Ham radio absolutely is not that . Yes, ham radios are used in emergency situations, but usually not as a mesh and certainly not as a standard.

“Mesh” doesn’t even make sense wrt ham. Aren’t hams just people broadcasting voice with amplitude modulation? Is there a data band? If so, are any hams willing to relay?

That's also what a wireless mesh network is. Nodes shout as loud as they can, and try to find other nodes to relay messages for them. Ham radio is a manually operated mesh, like semaphores.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#137

Post by lgcmo »

rta5 wrote: post #91

I started experimenting with meshtastic in December last year, but so far it has been a really quiet network, so I'm not seeing the congestion problems the author highlights. According to meshmap there should be a node ~2 miles from my house but I don't reliably see it. I don't see the next closest at 4.3 miles either. For some reason I saw the next furthest (~8.4 miles) for a few days, but it has since disappeared.…

I really like the technology and almost jumped in, but quickly realized the lack of the _network_ effect in a community.

I live in a dense urban area, and yet I see very few nodes nearby, where I image I will be left in starvation. Without a proper mesh, I couldn't send a message to a fried 2 miles away with no los.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#138

Post by Groxx »

bergie wrote: post #60
Groxx wrote: post #3

> To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post. Yeah, that's the general feel I get every time I poke into Mesh*. Neat radio tech, fun toy to find other nearby nerds, instantly-obvious problems that are fatal to growing beyond being that…

I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.

Boating seems like a pretty good fit here, yeah - adhoc and semi local, and everyone already relies on radio for stuff. And no issues with line of sight.

Is there no longer-range p2p digital tech here though? It tooks to me like this would always be island-local, if even that, and probably useless while further out. Though for inland stuff like smaller lakes that's not a problem.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#139

Post by m4rtink »

lgcmo wrote: post #137
rta5 wrote: post #91

I started experimenting with meshtastic in December last year, but so far it has been a really quiet network, so I'm not seeing the congestion problems the author highlights. According to meshmap there should be a node ~2 miles from my house but I don't reliably see it. I don't see the next closest at 4.3 miles either. For some reason I saw the next furthest (~8.4 miles) for a few days, but it has since disappeared.…

I really like the technology and almost jumped in, but quickly realized the lack of the _network_ effect in a community. I live in a dense urban area, and yet I see very few nodes nearby, where I image I will be left in starvation. Without a proper mesh, I couldn't send a message to a fried 2 miles away with no los.

Well, here in the Czech Republic we managed to cover all the main urban centers with MeshCore in less than one year:

https://analyzer.meshcore.cz/#/live

I can send a message to a friend in Prague with my MeshCore companion, it goes via the MeshCore repeater I have on my balcony which forwards the message to the local city mesh. Then it goes over various repeaters, usually on hills, to the Prague city mesh & reaches the friends companion. It usually takes about 8 to 10 hops, covering 200-400 km, based on the path taken.

Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

#140

Post by torginus »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #130
torginus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes. I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.

They don't. Resilience isn't additive. The more nodes you add, the more announcements and traffic you add, which congests the network further. Regular internet topologies work because of high throughput backbones.

my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors.

This is very much like pathfinding in a video game - you know how to get to a next the next grid square, and also your region you are in knows how to get to its neighboring ones - recursively to the top, but said info is distributed heuristically through the network.

Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.

Post reply on HN