Meshtastic

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A community to discuss Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction)

Other mesh communities:

MeshCore: !Meshcore@feddit.org Reticulum: !Reticulum@mander.xyz

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Cross State Communication (piefed.social)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by TechnoCat@piefed.social to c/meshtastic@mander.xyz

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If I live in one state and my parents live a few states over, would I be able to use this network to communicate with them? Not sure if this is a mesh network for long range routing.

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[–] cm@chaos.social 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

@gkaklas @TechnoCat What is "too far away"? I'm seeing nodes up to 120k away in meshtastic and 220+km in meshcore, specifically the meshcore network in my area is spanning three nations and their capitals.

[–] TechnoCat@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

Milwaukee, WI to Lansing, MI. Has to go around a great big lake and back up.

[–] gkaklas@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What is "too far away"?

Hmm, you're right, I guess I don't mean the distance of the link by itself, but rather the fact that the number of hops and the dependence on central (?) high-power long-range nodes limits how far a message can go

While technically a mesh network, I'm not sure that with 3-7 hops it provides the benefits of one; in theory, just by being mesh it should be able to have a much larger (unlimited?) reach, just like the Internet.

Instead, from what I understand, user nodes are recommended to not participate in the routing, = they are just clients, but by being "mesh" they would be expected to actively participate in the network.

In this sense of "peer-to-peer", we could say that my ISP is also a peer, and if it lost the connection to all other ISPs it could still continue working within the reach of its infrastructure, = my ISP is off-grid as well, and my connection to the ISP is independent since they own the fiber

Instead, I think the focus should be on building a distributed mesh network that is resilient and can't be taken down by the failure of a couple of nodes. Similarly, with the dependence on LoRa radios: if e.g. the import or usage specifically of LoRa™®© chips is banned, the nodes who chose to use alternative technologies would not be affected and the network could continue to operate normally

[–] cm@chaos.social 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@gkaklas My take is that for the given constraints (low-power, cheap, low-bandwidth) it works pretty well. If you want a more flexible (but way less beginner-friendly) mesh, have a look at reticulum, that can use all kinds of transport technologies.

[–] gkaklas@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago

for the given constraints (low-power, cheap, low-bandwidth) it works pretty well.

Of course! I'm just curious about 1) what are the real world use cases (e.g. my farm example) and 2) how come Meshtastic™®© is so popular with people who experiment with RF but don't have these constraints; how come that having a couple of points of failure (either in the nodes or the technology) and not being able to experiment outside of LoRa™®© is not more of an issue

(For example I found:)

Reticulum

I was looking into it, seems more like what I have in mind, thank you!