Is encryption allowed over this network? I know it’s not allowed over HAM. Also is triangulation / message source identification possible?
Yes, it is enabled by default (in fact this caused problems earlier on). Licensed hams (in the US) can increase transmit power (and theoretically use additional spectrum outside of ISM) but even the default "public" channel was encrypted with a known, publicized key. There was some debate whether this ran afoul of amateur radio rules against encryption, even if the key is known, since it cannot be disabled. I believe there was some progress in fixing this and allowing truly unencrypted channels for licensed operators, but I haven't checked back recently.
Reticulum (<a href="https://reticulum.network/" rel="nofollow">https://reticulum.network/</a>) seems to have quite a community with global chatrooms and local communities (saw at least US, Germany, Italy), seems like a more scalable solution than meshtastic imo.
Nth for MeshCore, which the Boston Mesh has found to be a much more scalable solution for building an emplaced mesh network with hundreds of clients: <a href="https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map?lat=42.00963&long=-70.96396&zoom=7" rel="nofollow">https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map?lat=42.00963&long=-70.9639...</a><p>Separately: while it's cool to chat human-style over these networks, lately I've been thinking that the real value add is last-mile automations. Stuff that won't clog the network like remote-starting your car once or twice a day, and is normally built on top of LTE.
I've seen several bigger Meshtastic networks in Europe that suffer from a dramatic unreliability.<p>Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community.<p>MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.<p>Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
Blocking a "rival" standard isn't necessarily petty censorship, it can also be spam control. I check the sub once in a while and I definitely do not want to see the same "but meshcore" whining over and over and over again.
I wanted to fix this with my FreakWAN but I was never able to find a user base willing to validate the ideas of the routing I implemented. All the code is open source and easy to modify.<p>Write me if you are willing to experiment :)
I was just about to ask this: a non partisan honest comparison between Meshtastic and Meshcore for different use cases such as long/short range, congestion resistance with nodes growth, resilience against adverse condition, ease of integration with different software, etc. without fanboyism/hatred/shilling etc involved to form an opinion before starting buying hardware and diving into one of the technologies.
In slovenia and neigboring countries there's a huge mesh of probably hundreds of nodes, some connected via radio, some via mqtt with people only working on expending the mesh and nothing else....<p>the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.<p>Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.
(The two amazon links for the antenna upgrade and pair of radios is swapped, if you're looking for the one, click the other)
Yay! Now you can enjoy the 8543 device roles Meshtastic has to offer, and see the static position and battery level eating away at airtime utilization.<p>How exciting!<p>Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads.<p>Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
Also Meshtastic codebase is the awful mess - one of the many examples when Arduinoslop became something bigger than quick prototype.
You seemed to have made an account just for this reply. Care to explain the cynicism? I’m out of the loop with the toxicity.
I'm not OP, but there's a lot of criticism of meshtastic from people knowledgable about mesh networks. I also have been critical of meshtastic on this site.<p>Here's an example of a good criticism: <a href="https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215" rel="nofollow">https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215</a><p>I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.<p>I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.<p>To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.
It's not clear to me which portions of that very long newsletter are responding specifically to Meshtastic, but it seems like the most relevant section starts by listing some challenges but offers nothing in the way of solutions except to digress into talking about a wildly different class of radio hardware (SDRs that can monitor many channels at once).
So you mean other than these sections right?<p>"Thought experiments about mesh networking"<p>"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"<p>"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"<p>Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."<p>Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
How about you make an actual argument <i>here</i> in this thread, instead of vaguely gesturing at an excessively long newsletter and claiming there's relevant substance in there somewhere? Or at least tell me if I've incorrectly interpreted the "<i>Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking</i>" section as listing problems but no solutions aside from buying a radically different (more expensive and power-hungry) type of radio?<p>Try making some <i>specific</i> suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.
I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with and learning about Meshtastic and MeshCore recently,[0] and I'm also puzzled by the criticism of Meshtastic.<p>In the article you linked, there are three paragraphs about Meshtastic in a 150-paragraph newsletter about several topics. The criticism seems to be that they they use digipeating, and then it refers to a Fedi thread[1] which is more coherent but still fairly vague. The upshot seems to be that flood routing doesn't scale, which is a fair criticism but feels disproportionate to the level of vitriol against the project.<p>The Fedi thread also adds that the Meshtastic founders were rude or unprofessional to him but doesn't cite any specifics or evidence.<p>I see this a lot with Meshtastic. People keep saying the founders are toxic and disrespectful of the community but it's always in these vague terms so I don't know what's driving it.<p>But specifically in this thread, I agree with sibling poster that you're being disrespectful and arguing ineffectively by pointing to such poor resources and then blaming other people for being unconvinced or confused.<p>[0] <a href="https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/" rel="nofollow">https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/113861754522594610" rel="nofollow">https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/113861754522594610</a>
It's much easier to call some protocol "bad design", after the fact, than to develop something yourself.
And presumably rely on discord despite MQTT?
I’ve done extensive mesh network testing in nyc and compared with notes from other big cities, and the number one thing you can do to dramatically improve mesh reliability is moving off of the default frequency. Staying on Longfast is fine, but find an alt freq and everything will suddenly work 10x better.
The Meshtastic list of networks is nice, but it is missing several. For example, the lack of listings in North Carolina led me to find <a href="https://ncmesh.net/" rel="nofollow">https://ncmesh.net/</a>.
Are meshtastic nodes still spamming their battery status over the network?<p>Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?
I'm ignorant of mesh technologies, but can somebody explain to me why they are using MQTT in their stack? Topics and pub-sub over TCP doesn't sound like a mesh-y kind of thing. Does it work well in this context?
The mesh isn't doing MQTT or TCP. They're using MQTT to bridge between meshes, with mesh nodes that have an internet connection or are paired to a smartphone with an internet connection relaying mesh traffic with an MQTT server.
MQTT is used for map reporting, and sometimes as a "fallback" or to connect distant meshes.