Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!

Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.

Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.

Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.

You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!

This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.

We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).

It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.

From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.

Put it on your roof with a cheap solar panel meant for a security camera, and join it to your home WiFi.

Just use the little plastic case it came in as an enclosure. Cut a hole for the antenna and USB.

A slightly larger antenna will help. There are many on Amazon, and they’re cheap.

(I have tried lots of boards and this has been the best setup for me)

The edges drawn are between nodes that have been able to hear each other in the last 24 hours, based on observed traceroute packets.

(Even then, it’s only a subset of the actually-connected nodes: the map only shows nodes that have published their position on the public channel, and have set a flag that their data is okay to uplink to a server over MQTT.)

But it’s the only radio-based mesh network I’ve ever “seen” anyone else on.

Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning.

https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/

Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.

LoRA is also used extensively for hobby size UAV handheld controller/ground control station to air unit controls, and in its narrower channel sizes can be very long range. The well known TBS crossfire serial bridge radio system which predates LoRA by a number of years uses a chipset that is sort of an ancestor of current-gen LoRA stuff.

This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.

Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh

Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters.

My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet.

Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent.

I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved.

I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested.

KR4KZI 73

https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...

https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol