So you have the mesh and then what?

Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means?

What is the use case?

> What is the use case?

It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate.

Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep.

The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times.

Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.

Some scary applications come to mind.

For instance, sprinkling a bunch of nodes + sensors in hostile territory should allow for gathering intelligence, guiding drones, setting of fuses...

Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.

Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network. Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.

That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…

...but also resistance in the context of authoritarian capture.

ExpressLRS[0] (drone / radio control protocol) also uses LoRa, I wonder if anyone's tried mesh networking it…

[0] https://www.expresslrs.org/

Russia and Ukraine both use meshed drone control networks now, dunno which tech stack, but likely this or similar.

Yeah. Actuality I was thinking about less sophisticated adversaries. So called "failed states", nonstate groups, organized crime, amateur surveillance, corporate espionage, sabotage.

Mesh networks are already used by both Russia and Ukraine to guide drones.

With the obvious solution of putting mesh nodes on the drones, foregoing the scattering part.

For everyone else, IoT is already there. And good old paying people to do things (the supply of dumb people never gets depleted).

People forget that this network isnt for everyday use. It is for use in ad-hoc scenarios where cell or even satellite coverage falls apart. The most powerful aspect is that these things are deployable. A communication chain can be established as fast as people can move. Natural disasters are the most obvious use case, but more interesting are things like search and rescue.

Go somewhere properly remote such as the high north. There is no cell network outside of town. And the satellite coverage is spotty at best. Say you need to go look for someone. Meshtastic relays can be up and working in minutes. A chain of rescuers can spread out along a path, and remain talking to each other, as fast as they can move. Sure, radios can do this too, but long range voice radio require serious power and are still largely line-of-sight. Radio relays are an entirely other expensive thing.

Think also of remote camps (logging/planting/fishing/climbing etc). Toss a lora relay on every vehicle and every work party can talk via the app installed on their normal phones. Use GPS-enabled devices and you can passively keep track of every vehicle. Need to operate two valleys over? As the first crew deploys out they can plop down relays at key points. Years ago I setup something like this using wifi relays. It was hell. It never worked right. The range and lower power demands of lora would have been infinitely easier.

The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.

Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.

> The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.

I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.

With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.

If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.

With no Line of Sight and crowded urban environment, it worked only slightly better than Wifi for my previous employer. Not even 100 meters.

This does not sound terribly different from the original use case for the internet. Are there similar routing algorithms in place ?

Mesh routing beyond the small scale is an unsolved problem.

Similar, no. The basis of the internet is that each node announces who they are connecting to. Each node is expected to know which messages (packets) they can handle and which they cannot. This works because connections on the internet are stable. Nodes in an unstable ad-hoc mesh network don't know how they are connected, who they can pass messages for. So every node takes every message and repeats it to whatever other nodes are in range. It is a fundamentally different problem.

But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario ?

Something that can also use devices we already have seems like a better solution. I'm surprised BitChat has not seen more popularity. Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.

Also arent LoRA systems mostly still line of sight?

> But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario?

They already have it because they ready HN! Only somewhat fascitious... A few motivated individuals can provide connectivity to thousands. There's probably a few such folks in your city already!

> Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.

This is exactly how these systems tend to work in practice. Just connect your phone via Bluetooth then use the Meshtastic app. The app can function on it's own to send messages to other phones without cell service, you just won't get the range.

I keep BitChat running on my phone.

Never had a peep from it. 0 connected peers, always -- in every environment.

This leads me to believe that it either does not work, or that I am the only one using it (in which case it also does not work).

The range of these things is approximately the range of a loud yell.

or miles easily on 900mhz if you’re on a hill…

"Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run ... sensors"

This is my use case. There are no other options that don't demand something like cell phone coverage (LOL no) and cost $1K/node and maybe $50/month until you give up on the project. For hobbyists this is a total non-starter. Do you have a budget for satellite telemetry, LOL no.

With meshcore its more like $100/node and $0/month forever which is somewhat more affordable than the next cheapest possible competitor.

For a scientific-ish environmental sensor that generates a couple integer data points every hour or so, its vastly more than fast enough. My project is not far enough along to discuss beyond that and I may end up scrapping it for reasons totally unrelated to networking LOL. At least the networking side was beyond trivial to set up.

Very handwavy meshcore is meshtastic plus the lessons about digipeating etc that ham radio guys (like me) figured out the hard way back in the 80s/90s. So I have zero interest in reinventing the wheel with meshtastic and reliving the problems of the 80s in the 20s. I don't think meshtastic devs looked at prior art when they initially designed it, or they would have done things quite a bit more like meshcore.

There is approximately infinite interpersonal drama in both projects with all kinds of legal wrangling and much bike shedding apparently to prevent progress. I would not be surprised if TPTB are using funded LLM bots to disrupt those projects. Its pretty bad but as long as you stay away from the communities and socializing, both projects produce good code. I suppose for people that like that sort of thing, either project would be very attractive.

If you see this technology and think "wow! that solves [problem I already have]" - then it's great.

Otherwise, you buy a couple, set them up, spend a week or two sending very slow and unreliably forwarded messages that mostly amount to "hi! i have an ACME 32ABC radio! What do you have?", and then put it in a drawer or sell it on.

Just like ham radio, really.

It runs independently of internet and power. One use case is a group of people in a remote area (hikers, hunters) carrying their own node and being able to communicate via text over several kilometres.

v. a satellite enabled phone that can send text messages over thousands of kilometers?

These people should not be making a short range text solution, they should be building a low bandwidth internet extension with gateways to the real internet. Most of the information content of the internet can readily fit over 56kb lines once you strip out all the fluff. And in an emergency where you need or want a decentralized mesh network, that's more important that being able to text, who exactly?

Or you just use iPhone satellite messaging without relying on extra devices that may not even work in mountains

This won't reliably get messages between two users in the mountains.

Neither will Meshtastic!

You can use both. In the mountains I would appreciate redundancy.

A PMR or DMR radio can also do that. And is cheaper and user friendlier.

DMR without needing the site to setup your ID etc?

might have mixed it up with dPMR, HAMs have lots of overlapping similar stuff... and love gatekeeping.

Nevertheless IMO the mentioned demographics/use-cases want something turnkey ready, ~single button, and currently LORA based stuff is not like that, and is clumsier and needs a certain level of... tinkerer mindset, compared to a commercial license free radio system (which might have been set up with a minimal effort), where learning curve is basically volume knob and PTT button.

I have handed out simple FM radios for total tech-illiterate people (mothers, children, elderly physical workers) in an outdoor event with 0 cell coverage, and comms worked perfectly over the dozen square kilometer area. Biggest incident was a lost radio handset.

I was more pointing out the irony that DMR is being promoted which requires centralization.

Also, DMR isn’t all about Ham Radio. It is used commercially.

It's not all people trying to skirt the law. It's kind of like HAM radio as a hobby. It's fun technology that lets people do cool automation projects and sure with a mesh connect to other people. Imagine you have a few acres of land and want to turn on sprinklers or something.

A lot of people use it just to chat with friends and family in a fun way.

Of course the preppers and privacy evangelists see it as a means to get ready for living in a hostile environment. Being fair to them, things don't look awesome in the US.

I bet a few criminals use it, but it's still very niche.

There is no real use case, IMO. I setup a few nodes a couple of months ago. It's mostly no activity, punctuated by some random "can you read me" type messages, and for some unknown reason people who think there is something impressive about them having a node on a commercial flight.

The entire thing would fall over in any kind of scenario where you needed to rely on this janky mesh network as a primary means of communications.

It can be fun/useful for very out of the way things where you have a handful of people out camping, or other off-grid situations. But frankly even in those cases there are far better/established ways to keep in sync if you need to (eg: FRS).

This stuff is mostly a solution looking for a problem.

Just like ham radio, it's a an interesting technical hobby for those that may get excited when their little 0.25W radio hits a repeater 80km away.

More practically, I'm going to try it out while camping this summer. In areas with low or no cell coverage, my phone is useless or dies quickly. Throw a repeater in a tree, and hand your friends nodes.

Its one of the few places you can be fairly sure you're chatting to people, not bots, who have no agenda to sell you anything.

Of course if it ever becomes popular, that will quickly change. But for now it is like early IRC.

No one has once ever spoken to me on it.

Even if someone did, you’d only get every 10th message.

The use case is off grid communications for whatever you might need.

95% of it is people just doing ping? Pong! In chat.

The cheapest devices are like $10. Order one and have a go.

I built one and found absolutely no use for it. No one ever, and I mean ever, answers you. It's sort of like ham radio, where you get your technician license and get on a net and discover people are just talking about their antennas. Except it's worse, because all the antenna discussions are happening on Reddit and Discord and not on the network itself.

People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".

HAM I think used to be more popular when it didnt have all this competition and it makes total sense

The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.

Being nerdy.

But also you don’t build these things when you need them (it will be too late), you need to build them before you need them.

Digital Radio Hobbying, think HAM radio but with a microcontroller and apps.

> What is the use case?

I worked R&D on LoRa project a few years ago. Their use case was a long-range emergency communication system for workers in remote areas(no wifi, lte or LEO at that time). Now I see a bunch of applications in this field that aren't what you describe. :)

I set up my first node after the last major Verizon outage that rendered my cell phone useless as a mobile communications device. Now, when the next outage happens, with the always-on base station that I have at home, I can bring a portable Meshtastic radio out with me, paired to my phone via Bluetooth, and retain the ability communicate wirelessly back home, or with any of the other many nodes in the extensive network here in the NYC / Hudson Valley region. I also enticed a couple of local friends to install them and we often opt to text over the mesh. I see it as a thing that is fun to play around with now, but which may become critical at some point in the future.

Like HAM radio: nobody needs it, until a real emergency strikes.

Then everyone does.

Except the bandwidth just isn't there.

There's not much bandwidth in HAM radio either.

Any bandwidth is better than zero.

I would love to be able to get text alerts when an event occurs, from a location that is not connected to the Internet, about a mile away. The need is not critical, so there is no desire to spend money every month. And reliability of the solution does not have to be high either.

Something like this might work?

Yes.

hiking with so far you don't have cell access. cruises when you don't have cell access.

It's really for closed user groups. At least meshtastic doesn't allow you to see other people's messages, only those in your own group. They're all encrypted.

I've seen it used by folks off-roading/overlanding for coms.

Gov/DoD/SpecOps use it to maintain radio connectivity with things like the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK).

People will go on and on about what happens to society when the internet or cell service goes offline, but when they see an emergency solution staring them directly in the face, they wonder what the use case is.

"What is the use case?"

Advertising services

But only if use of the network becomes popular

(Generally no one thought this would be the eventual use case for the internet)

Unlike ham radio, it allows encryption and doesn't forbid commercial use, so it'll get taken over by commercial interests if it works, or ignored if it remains small or fails. If it works the pioneers will get wiped out and removed from the network...

I used to wonder the same thing and then we bought a vacation home. It's only a 40 min highway drive outside our top 20 U.S. big city metro area. Some friends have said "that's not even far enough to be a 'get away'" and several of our neighbors there commute daily to work in big buildings downtown. Our street is only 12 mins drive from a major interstate highway with the usual suburban superstore sprawl (Target, WalMart, Home Depot, Costco) so it feels like we're in the middle of 'civilization'. But once you turn off the highway, that last 12 mins gets both beautiful (with rugged hills) and also very empty.

Five mins from our house suddenly cell service from all the providers gets very spotty. If you live near the top of a hill facing the right direction, you can maybe jury rig a cellular antenna on a pole. There is legacy POTS phone service via 60 year-old copper but few use it because it's only ISDN barely faster than dial-up and >$100/mo. Otherwise, there was no option for reliable residential phone/data/text service until Starlink became available in our area a couple years ago.

So everyone in our entire area has 2M radios to communicate in emergencies because in four years we've had two fires come close enough to close our roads, been snowed in twice (without power) and a small bridge got damaged in flooding blocking vehicle access in and out for four days. So, sometimes you need to get extremely local information from, and coordinate with, neighbors you can't even see and have to hike to visit. But the old 2M radios have to be monitored in a real-time which feels really antiquated. So, to me, inexpensive LoRa that could enable store-and-forward messaging and conditional unattended alerts suddenly sounds very useful.

I'm using one of those devices with a tiny eink screen... as a pocket ebook reader. Sorry for the bait. Fun and easy project though, lookup Pala one if you're interested and dm me for improved firmware (restrictive license)

Sounds intriguing. How is the battery life? Color e-ink or BW?

Would be great if it also ran some type of Topo mapping software!

BW. I don't think colour would do much, as the screen is 250x122. Battery may depend on what you can find, but the one I have should last several weeks (still testing). I started on a tiny LiPo I ripped from my cat's floppy fish toy.

To give more info here, it uses Heltec Wireless Paper, which is a self-contained unit and just needs a battery added.

You send "test" and hope that someone replies.

Sometimes you discuss new Meshtastic gear or setting up a router together.

LoRa is for long range lower power communication. It can achieve a range of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in practical conditions and up to 330 kilometers (210 miles) in perfect conditions. There are plenty of applications for it.

One of the use cases is pairing it up with ATAK or similar tactical awareness system during SAR operations by volunteer brigades in remote areas with spotty coverage by regular networks.

More info here if someone's interested: https://www.civtak.org/

are you a fed? lol.

Useful for things like music festivals, campgrounds, having a mesh node in your camper van and another with your friends and another on your person. Imagine a large festival outside of good cellphone coverage or a camp site in the middle of nowhere. There are also credit-card sized versions which can be put in a dog's harness in case the dog wanders off (the radio contains a GPS).

> in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.

I don't know about online tools, but it should be the opposite when actually using it, as by default Meshtastic is much more chatty (and wasteful) than Meshcore.

Meshtastic is horrible in a metro area. The area I live in has a huge user group and it's almost impossible to get a message across more than 3 nodes reliably. Meshcore, on the other hand, is far less popular but still has a nice amount of repeaters and it's, conversely, very good. I've since moved all of my devices to Meshcore. I'm on the edge of a metro (about 30 miles out) and have a repeater at one of the highest points in my geo and can seamlessly message users on the other side of the metro (~60 miles).

I tried Meshtastic here in London (UK), but was struggling with anything more than 1 hop away. There's no coordination, everyone's using the long fast preset, etc. Then found out about Meshcore, flashed the firmware, selected the UK narrow preset, and it's a day and night difference.

Still wouldn't rely on this for anything serious because it's not reliable at all, but it's nice to be able to send a message across the city or to the other side of the country.

Similarly, I put a repeater in an upper story of an apartment building in Boston and am reliably able to talk to people over 10+ hops. Right this second I'm able to talk to someone 99.5 miles away in Vermont.

We had to create different channels for different regions (connecticut, new hampshire, massachusetts, rhode island) just to keep from having hundreds of messages in a single public channel when posts are generally about local things.

Unfortunately it doesn't fix congestion issues completely, repeaters still repeat everything (and can't listen while transmitting) so packets from connecticut still put traffic onto the entire mesh all the way to new hampshire, but at least it's better organized.

It seems like there are some ideas to help with congestion, maybe making channels region specific (repeaters can be programmed to only repeat traffic with a certain region code) but for now it's shocking to me how far I can reach with a 0.125W radio.

But yeah, it's not "reliable", that's what TCP/IP is for =) Definitely a toy network for now, and a single malicious bot on the frequency band would absolutely wreck it. Or a single high power jammer sending out noise at just the wrong frequency. Definitely a fun project for people who would do ham radio if they had any interest in taking a test...

I wouldn't use it for emergencies though, it's theoretically a backup if the cell network and internet go down but the reliability just isn't there and I suspect never will be.

The meshcore app is closed source

The firmware is open source. There are many apps, some are open source, some are freeware.

Does it apply to the meshcore.io app as well? From what I know (not a meshcore user currently) there has been a kerfuffle recently when a developer decided to fork and vibe code the project using Claude, then silently trademark the name and move everything to his own website. The original and legit site should be meshcore.io while the .co.uk site was created by that developer and isn't considered official nor reliable by the community.

Only the app store app which does not matter for usage. There are tons of other clients. Core firmware is Open Source.

Give yourself lots of time and lots of time, oh and more time. And then more. The code is buggy and the concept as well as the code is unreliable. It’s not even as good as udp