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

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

#91

Post by rta5 »

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. Since Christmas I've seen 583 nodes from mine - none reliably.

My node is a solar powered tree hanger hanging maybe 25 ft above the ground, and I'm in southeast michigan with a typical ~30 minute commute into the suburban cities.

I really liked this article but in the end it reinforced my belief in meshtastic - I don't need a computer connected to my node and I'm not paying for any meshcore features. I just wish there were more fixed nodes out there to extend the network.

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

#92

Post by PaulHoule »

raffael_de wrote: post #89
rcarmo wrote: post #56

I’ve spent my entire career in telco and networking and loved the rise of Wi-Fi (which we used spectacularly over long distances when the spectrum was clear to show off my mates in 3G/microwave backhaul), and have been keeping up with LoRA and related stuff (got a few HelTec boards), but all the recent meshtastic/core/etc. stuff feels a bit like the early wardriving community (and CB radio): fun, full of ideas, but w…

> but without enough structure (or mass appeal) to take off I think the most important requirement for a mesh technology to take off is a purpose that is practically relevant right now. Let's assume the mesh network exists - now what? Now you can send messages to other nerds but ... what do you even want to send as a message? That's why ham radio basically bottomed out at contests, Morse code challenges and exchangin…

Yeah, nobody wants to chew the rag anymore!

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

#93

Post by LelouBil »

I just started trying Meshtastic last month, there's nobody doing it in my city so it's just me giving esp32s to friends to try to make a mesh, but I'm getting into range limitations because I don't know enough people to bridge some gaps !

I even tried changing the radio preset to Very slow Long for example, but I didn't really get better range, I don't know why.

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

#94

Post by PaulHoule »

neilalexander wrote: post #73
lormayna wrote: post #54

I 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 ra…

You have two conditions: not dense enough or too dense and the fractal nature of population mean you can have both. Radio bandwidth is a precious resource and if you think somehow that anything good will come out of sending a packet N times you are not likely to manage a wireless network successfully.

There are systems like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...

But they are pretty specialized and not that scalable

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

#95

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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.…

Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.

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

#97

Post by brk »

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 ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience.

Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing.

It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.

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

#98

Post by brk »

raffael_de wrote: post #6

This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (il…

The issue is that these mesh protocols quickly break down under any real loads.

Setting up a few mesh nodes, running some tests, and thinking you have a kit that is usable in an emergency is like so many other "disaster recovery" drills we've been through that assume ideal conditions. The excellent daily tape backups that you realize too late you can't utilize in a bare metal recovery situation because nobody kept an OS install media handy, or they forgot to keep the installer and license keys for the backup software in the datacenter.

The challenge with these mesh systems is that few, if any, areas have even gotten to a point that they could run a realistic simulation of relying on this system for communications.

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

#99

Post by hylaride »

mschuster91 wrote: post #16
mingus88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That weakness is a strength. Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything How many places like that are left?

> Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.

I run a few Meshcore nodes in Toronto - mostly as a nerd hobby. In some ways it has the feel of the 1990s internet and in some ways it's the same feel as ham radio . It has smart nerds, but also some unhinged people who are desperate to force people to hear them. Then there are the trolls...

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

#100

Post by MiracleRabbit »

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.…

All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters.

Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)

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