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I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
71–80 of 152 posts
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#72I’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).
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#73I am an happy user of Meshstastic since more than one year (I have two active nodes and a third one is in the making). I am living in hilly countryside and the difficult that I have experienced is about reaching other nodes: with the standard antenna, I can barely connect with nodes in a 500 meters range, with a better antenna (coaxial collinear is the best IMHO) I can reach more than 10km. I don't think the Meshstat…
None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, AODV-esque routing (which MeshCore tries to do for DMs and Reticulum tries to do in general) is prone to almost-immediate path failure on unstable underlying transports, and the hidden node problem always bites on haphazard/unplanned mesh radio deployments where people show up with nodes in random locations on the same frequency.
The cracks are already extremely visible in MeshCore in the UK, where overheads from adverts and dropped packets from collisions mean it is already horrendously unreliable and most of the chatter in the Public channel is people sending test messages and being unsure whether anything they sent was ever heard by anyone.
Most other routing protocols (BATMAN included) are also not that well suited to situations where the underlying transport ends up asymmetric, e.g. one node can't hear others but it can be heard, and that's an extremely common occurrence/failure mode in wireless meshes like this. It's a difficult problem to solve with coordination between nodes, let alone without.
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#74IMHO this article misses a couple really important points. First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control…
> but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.
Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#75Am I the only one who thinks MeshCore shouldn’t be called „off grid“? Unlike Meshtastic and Reticulum, the need for router nodes is built into the protocol itself in MeshCore. And while nodes are cheap and amateurs can put them up, that is still a grid that has to exist for your MeshCore client to be useful…
You totally can use Meshcore without repeater, and companions can be used like routers. This functionality can be enabled any time using one checkbox in app. It switches the radios to slightly different frequency and enables repeat mode in personal nodes, this gives you one small network. No repeater needed. And in this mode you don't clutter "main" mesh with your local mesh. The main difference between Meshcore and…
„main“ mesh IS „the grid“
If I have to modify settings and effectively kick myself off the mesh, then it doesn’t matter which protocol I use. By the same logic, you can just choose different settings on Meshtastic and get the same results, but you will not have anyone to mesh with.
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#76I really like LoRa and its range, but unfortunately the hardware is much more expensive than e.g. Zigbee or WiFi devices.
Would love a LoRaWAN router but they run around ~80€/80$ and just for playing around with it it is a bit much.
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#77IMHO this article misses a couple really important points. First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control…
> but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become. Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
A swarm of millions of devices (that can be solar powered) could be more resilient than the "few" nodes that the "internet" architecture has. I guess that is the motivation, in theory.
Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#78I'd pivot over to the MANET folks (https://openmanet.net/). The 900MHz HaLow stuff is exciting to see on the data front for some moderate-speed data connectivity.
(It's basically an open source version of an MPU-5, basically. https://persistentsystems.com/mpu5/)
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become. Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
A swarm of millions of devices (that can be solar powered) could be more resilient than the "few" nodes that the "internet" architecture has. I guess that is the motivation, in theory. Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
> Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
Not sure why people are so hyper-focused on the La Liga case in Spain, Spain done so much worse censorship, even political one, yet no one seemingly bats an eye. But some IPs getting blocks because Cloudflare doesn't follow Spanish law? Suddenly half of HN cares about it, it makes no sense...
How about when a Women's rights website started being blocked in Spain? (https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/womens-rights-we...) How about the Gag Law that existed since 2015, limiting public demonstrations? How about when the central government prevented an "autonomous" region from even thinking about having a referendum? How about the laws against "insulting" the crown?
Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
There has been so much censorship here, so much more important censorship than some random piracy stream websites going offline, yet not a single person here seems to remember those more important cases, just as long as a US company involved, then suddenly it's important and worth referencing.
Freedom on the world wide web and the public internet been kind of hanging by a thread for multiple decades at this point, and I'm also on the side of "We need new physical infrastructure if we're gonna have a chance".
Meshtastic, Guifi, Freifunk, NYCMesh and more are wonderful efforts that hopefully at one point can group together, we all have more or less the same ideas and same goals, right now it's all separate networks though.
Re: I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
#80In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks. More of everything, of course! But I'm far more interested in making the wifi we have more ad-hoc capable, more useful anywhere any time, for whatever, especially on the longer range bands like 900MHz.
Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.
HaLow is just Wi-Fi on sub-1GHz frequencies and narrower channels. You get normal MTUs and TCP & UDP work just fine.