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.

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 what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.

Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.

This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.

It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, 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.

I do wish we had a proper, working emergency meshing standard, though. An international one, too.

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 toy (or small specialized personal nets, where it's totally fine). They feel more like a tech demo than anything actually intended to survive.

Which is fine, you kinda need that to start out, and they do work today. Just... hard to get excited about.

In comparison 2 modern smartphones with no WiFi AP or no cell coverage can't really use any of the usual messaging (or even data transfer) services to communicate directly. Yeah, there are some ways to connect via bluetooth or a mobile wifi hotspot, but it all looks like very begrudgingly added and not well supported for easy use by mainstream mobile OS and hardware companies.

I don't think the Meshstatic approach of "flooding" the network with all the messages can be scalable in the long run, they need to implement some sort of routing protocols (like BATMAN), but they are heavy and complex to implement

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).

Like the internet, but self-configuring and peer to peer.

Yes, there are lots of technical and social challenges, but I don't believe they are unsolvable.

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.

Would love a LoRaWAN router but they run around ~80€/80$ and just for playing around with it it is a bit much.

https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/

Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!

(It's basically an open source version of an MPU-5, basically. https://persistentsystems.com/mpu5/)

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.

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…