I started experimenting with meshtastic in December last year, but so far it has been a really quiet network, so I'm not seeing the congestion problems the author highlights. According to meshmap there should be a node ~2 miles from my house but I don't reliably see it. I don't see the next closest at 4.3 miles either. For some reason I saw the next furthest (~8.4 miles) for a few days, but it has since disappeared. Since Christmas I've seen 583 nodes from mine - none reliably.
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.
All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters.
Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience.
Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing.
It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.
Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.
IMHO this article misses a couple really important points.
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.
The meshcore software, and the common hardware being used, are both comically weak for anything that approaches usage at scale, especially in an emergency situation.
The range is extremely limited, and the throughput gets really bad if your packets have to travel more than a few hops. These two factors alone combine to write this off as nothing more than a toy pretty much from the start.
There are already unlicensed radios with longer range that would be a better starting point if people were trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
>Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This point isn't unique to meshcore, and it is not a guarantee. Any solar powered and battery-backed device can function without utility power (in theory). Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
Huge +1 here! Work out scenario planning of Meshtastic/Meshcore with one of the GPT's and they top out at like ~100k users and like 10msg/sec or something ludicrously low.
At something like $100/node and 5000 nodes in a major metro (eg: Dallas) it's like a $500k investment and you're maxed out at low data rates and saturated topology.
That's 5k nodes in a (generous) 5 million population and ~500 square mile area. More like 9M people and 9000 square miles. (I checked, and that's "extended metroplex", but reasonable: Decatur to Cleburne, Weatherford to Kaufman).
At 5k nodes saturating an area, it's basically a rich persons toy very well suitable to remote or low-density areas, but NEVER for 1:1 saturation deployment in any sort of high density area.
This has been said about every interchange technology, ever. Doesn’t matter, still EOF’ed.
>trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
.. well, scale is a matter of one thing: location, location, location ...
>range
.. is an end-user value decision, as in, you might think its too slow for your browsing needs, but there are a thousand applications that will use the bandwidth offered to the average user, at the average users own personal speed, according to the needs of the average user.
Just like in the good ol’ days of soggy noodle internetworking, the current zeitgeist apropos mesh-based local low-power radio technology, is entirely ruled by the user.
Case in point: some friends and I have deployed our own small Meshtastic network, and we use it exclusively to organize our social network. This particular use case isn’t particularly ‘easily’ exploitable by third parties, since we have some modicum of encryption - but it certainly supports our need here and now in a big city - but, more importantly some of us will take the little lovely boxes with them when they go sailing next week, and our range will be significantly extended for the purpose …
>Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
If you need solar, build a meshcore node with solar.
Nay-saying like this is as old as the hills, there’s nothing special about it, everyone does it…
> 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.
Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
A swarm of millions of devices (that can be solar powered) could be more resilient than the "few" nodes that the "internet" architecture has. I guess that is the motivation, in theory.
Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
> Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
Not sure why people are so hyper-focused on the La Liga case in Spain, Spain done so much worse censorship, even political one, yet no one seemingly bats an eye. But some IPs getting blocks because Cloudflare doesn't follow Spanish law? Suddenly half of HN cares about it, it makes no sense...
How about when a Women's rights website started being blocked in Spain? (https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/womens-rights-we...) How about the Gag Law that existed since 2015, limiting public demonstrations? How about when the central government prevented an "autonomous" region from even thinking about having a referendum? How about the laws against "insulting" the crown?
Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
There has been so much censorship here, so much more important censorship than some random piracy stream websites going offline, yet not a single person here seems to remember those more important cases, just as long as a US company involved, then suddenly it's important and worth referencing.
Freedom on the world wide web and the public internet been kind of hanging by a thread for multiple decades at this point, and I'm also on the side of "We need new physical infrastructure if we're gonna have a chance".
Meshtastic, Guifi, Freifunk, NYCMesh and more are wonderful efforts that hopefully at one point can group together, we all have more or less the same ideas and same goals, right now it's all separate networks though.
> Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
I didn't know about this, so I looked it up: it's because they sell prescription-only abortion medication and ship directly to consumers, where it's legally only available via prescription and medical oversight. Fundamentally they're blocked for ignoring medical regulations. There were some appeals, but the argument is that access to abortion medication is already a well-protected right, so that this is dangerous and unnecessary, and it's not possible to block that while unblocking the rest of their educational resources.
Such a bullshit reason though, the real reason is that the church don't like women deciding over their own bodies, and the church wields real political power in Spain.
Using a VPN, and trying to use that website to "order abortion pills" today to Spain shows this error:
> You live in a country where there is access to safe abortion services. We don't provide services in your country and we therefore are unable to assist you.
You haven't been able to get abortion pills from them for years, yet the same reason for the block remains, even if that's not actually true in practice.
The block is being escalated to UN though, so it's still an ongoing issue, not like nothing is happening, just frustrating to see people complaining about minor censorship when there is so much more important censorship happening all the time.
I’ve spent my entire career in telco and networking and loved the rise of Wi-Fi (which we used spectacularly over long distances when the spectrum was clear to show off my mates in 3G/microwave backhaul), and have been keeping up with LoRA and related stuff (got a few HelTec boards), but all the recent meshtastic/core/etc. stuff feels a bit like the early wardriving community (and CB radio): fun, full of ideas, but without enough structure (or mass appeal) to take off.
I do wish we had a proper, working emergency meshing standard, though. An international one, too.
> but without enough structure (or mass appeal) to take off
I think the most important requirement for a mesh technology to take off is a purpose that is practically relevant right now. Let's assume the mesh network exists - now what? Now you can send messages to other nerds but ... what do you even want to send as a message? That's why ham radio basically bottomed out at contests, Morse code challenges and exchanging specs ... there is nothing to say. Maybe the biggest problem of mesh networks isn't technology but society. If there is a purpose that at least serves nerds making up 0.1% of the population then that would be amazing and mass appeal would actually be more cause for trouble than desirable.
Off-grid messaging is helpful for my family (skiing, camping, hiking). They have zero interest in ham radio but a funny looking messaging app isn't a problem. Regular walkies talkies (FRS, GMRS) don't relay/hop, work asynchronously, or transmit GPS positions.
It's the same problem with things like Geminispace, or hobbyist phone networks. The only thing Gemini users have in common is hating what the internet has become. The only thing TandmX users have in common is some interest in phones or phone systems.
But on the other hand, isn't it also true of the Internet?
I had a friend who worked in telco as well, and he told me the reason why IP-based networking solutions will never completely replace earlier stuff like GSM is that the QoS algorithms used work extremely well in practice (which mesh networks prove), their behavior is completely nondeterministic, and tends to have really bad failure cases in overload, or certain nodes in the network failing.
Which means in SHTF situations (such as one when most people imagine this would be useful), these things tend to fail the most.
LoRA can work but there needs to be a backbone, either terrestrially via towers with repeaters or LEO constellations. Everything else is doomed to fail.
The request was for "a proper, working emergency meshing standard". Ham radio absolutely is not that. Yes, ham radios are used in emergency situations, but usually not as a mesh and certainly not as a standard.
“Mesh” doesn’t even make sense wrt ham. Aren’t hams just people broadcasting voice with amplitude modulation? Is there a data band? If so, are any hams willing to relay?
>To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post.
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.
Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
> Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.
Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out
I run a few Meshcore nodes in Toronto - mostly as a nerd hobby. In some ways it has the feel of the 1990s internet and in some ways it's the same feel as ham radio . It has smart nerds, but also some unhinged people who are desperate to force people to hear them. Then there are the trolls...
I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes.
I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.
The inherent limitations of free spectrum mesh technologies will never lend itself to a replacement for the Internet so will always largely exist in niches. Niches like personal nets, local nerd networks, or emergency response (tho actual first responders are not the most eager to try this stuff based on my experiences in the community.) All of this can be a feature or a bug depending on whom you ask.
On the mesh in Toronto with meshcore we have regular communication that reach all the way to Buffalo. We are past the « toy » stage, it’s truly impressive.
It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet.
I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network.
Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not.
I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale.
To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work!
*disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!
One aspect of MeshCore and similar technologies I really like is that the end user devices can directly communicate with each other seamlessly - if you have 2 MeshCore companions nearby, they can just send messages directly, no need for a repeater.
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.
This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.
The issue is that these mesh protocols quickly break down under any real loads.
Setting up a few mesh nodes, running some tests, and thinking you have a kit that is usable in an emergency is like so many other "disaster recovery" drills we've been through that assume ideal conditions. The excellent daily tape backups that you realize too late you can't utilize in a bare metal recovery situation because nobody kept an OS install media handy, or they forgot to keep the installer and license keys for the backup software in the datacenter.
The challenge with these mesh systems is that few, if any, areas have even gotten to a point that they could run a realistic simulation of relying on this system for communications.
In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago.
It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh.
I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
> a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Why? WiFi technology is cheap and available. Seems like a great basis for a mesh.
> Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
Why "just"? All the internet protocols are also just messaging at the end of the day - request: A sends message to B, response: B sends message to A.
> On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff
I'm not familiar with Reticulum (neither with Mesh* in any meaningful way) - do you mean to say that Reticulum is more flexible regarding the radio technology - as in: no need to by specific devices like for Meshcore?
> I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
I am an happy user of Meshstastic since more than one year (I have two active nodes and a third one is in the making). I am living in hilly countryside and the difficult that I have experienced is about reaching other nodes: with the standard antenna, I can barely connect with nodes in a 500 meters range, with a better antenna (coaxial collinear is the best IMHO) I can reach more than 10km.
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
None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, AODV-esque routing (which MeshCore tries to do for DMs and Reticulum tries to do in general) is prone to almost-immediate path failure on unstable underlying transports, and the hidden node problem always bites on haphazard/unplanned mesh radio deployments where people show up with nodes in random locations on the same frequency.
The cracks are already extremely visible in MeshCore in the UK, where overheads from adverts and dropped packets from collisions mean it is already horrendously unreliable and most of the chatter in the Public channel is people sending test messages and being unsure whether anything they sent was ever heard by anyone.
Most other routing protocols (BATMAN included) are also not that well suited to situations where the underlying transport ends up asymmetric, e.g. one node can't hear others but it can be heard, and that's an extremely common occurrence/failure mode in wireless meshes like this. It's a difficult problem to solve with coordination between nodes, let alone without.
You have two conditions: not dense enough or too dense and the fractal nature of population mean you can have both. Radio bandwidth is a precious resource and if you think somehow that anything good will come out of sending a packet N times you are not likely to manage a wireless network successfully.
Personally I find it very satisfying to get long near-line-of-site performance in VHF and up. That could be reaching a repeater 100+ miles away on two meters with a handheld and a tape measure yagi
or talking to somebody with a bigger station 300+ miles away because of a tropospheric duct or just getting into the WiFi at the hospital from the other side of the lake.
These ideas yes, but these networks already have a concept of message oriented semantics and so there's not much of a need to rebuild most of those protocols. A lot of what Finger, Gopher, et al does is define the application layer semantics to transmit documents over stream oriented protocols.
I’ve looked at this stuff, because of its utility as an emergency communication system.
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).
For emergency comms(remember, emergency services provided by the state don't monitor the ham bands, so can't call them), a $20 ham radio would work or just carry FRS radios.
FCC does allow use of a ham radio in a real emergency without a license.
I just started trying Meshtastic last month, there's nobody doing it in my city so it's just me giving esp32s to friends to try to make a mesh, but I'm getting into range limitations because I don't know enough people to bridge some gaps !
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.
I was the first to setup a Meshcore room server in my city. New I get pings from all over the place and it's busy. It seems to be extremely popular in Switzerland for some reason.
Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.
Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!
I have a very different experience - here in Europe with 868 MHz MeshCore you get good singnal from a repeater through one or two city blocks with non ideal antenna placement.
With reasonable line of sight tens of kilometers & much more is doable. There are some repeaters on mountains that connect bigger regional meshes with packets going >100 km regularly.
WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...
I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete.
915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
Reticulum would probably be the best one for it. As far as I can tell there aren't any interfaces for it already, but if you can get a command that transfers data using stdin and sdtout, Reticulum has things like the PipeInterface https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html
Just to throw in my experience, got 2 RAK19007 after the last HN post. Mostly just for me and my kid to play with. He took an interest in Flipper Zero recently and Mestastic seems like a fun expansion on that interest. In the Western NY area, about a week up and running, devices just sitting on my desk, I've got a node list of 215, and I've communicated with people from Rochester to Canada.
I'd pivot over to the MANET folks (https://openmanet.net/). The 900MHz HaLow stuff is exciting to see on the data front for some moderate-speed data connectivity.
In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks.
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.
Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.
I think there are people playing with Halow with Reticulum. That's one advantage of having a multi-transport system. There is also a Bluetooth transport now:
https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720
Am I the only one who thinks MeshCore shouldn’t be called „off grid“?
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…
No, you're not alone. MeshCore is very neat tech, but I love that you can show up to, say, a music fest with a few Meshtastic radios and voila, instant mesh. To me, it feels more in the spirit of the thing. That's purely subjective, but that's how I see it.
You totally can use Meshcore without repeater, and companions can be used like routers. This functionality can be enabled any time using one checkbox in app. It switches the radios to slightly different frequency and enables repeat mode in personal nodes, this gives you one small network. No repeater needed. And in this mode you don't clutter "main" mesh with your local mesh.
The main difference between Meshcore and Meshtastic is how telemetry is handled. In Meshcore to get telemetry the other party needs to request it, whereas in Meshtastic telemetry is sent in flood mode in configured intervals. That's why Meshtastic is better suited for (A)TAK [1]. But because Meshtastic sends telemetry anyway there is less and less airtime for chat messages, and it gets to the point where you can't talk to people. For small groups this is fine, for bigger groups/meshes this is no bueno.
If I have to modify settings and effectively kick myself off the mesh, then it doesn’t matter which protocol I use. By the same logic, you can just choose different settings on Meshtastic and get the same results, but you will not have anyone to mesh with.
I got into it too back in 2012. Frankly it’s not a very interesting space unless you’re trying to circumvent nation wide internet shutdowns because for everything else encrypted chat channels serve the same purpose and everyone is doing it (WhatsApp, signal, telegram etc)
I started experimenting with meshtastic in December last year, but so far it has been a really quiet network, so I'm not seeing the congestion problems the author highlights. According to meshmap there should be a node ~2 miles from my house but I don't reliably see it. I don't see the next closest at 4.3 miles either. For some reason I saw the next furthest (~8.4 miles) for a few days, but it has since disappeared. Since Christmas I've seen 583 nodes from mine - none reliably.
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.
All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters.
Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience.
Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing.
It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.
For sensor stuff use LoRaWAN + Mirotik Basestation + Chirpstack
Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.
IMHO this article misses a couple really important points.
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.
The meshcore software, and the common hardware being used, are both comically weak for anything that approaches usage at scale, especially in an emergency situation.
The range is extremely limited, and the throughput gets really bad if your packets have to travel more than a few hops. These two factors alone combine to write this off as nothing more than a toy pretty much from the start.
There are already unlicensed radios with longer range that would be a better starting point if people were trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
>Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This point isn't unique to meshcore, and it is not a guarantee. Any solar powered and battery-backed device can function without utility power (in theory). Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
Huge +1 here! Work out scenario planning of Meshtastic/Meshcore with one of the GPT's and they top out at like ~100k users and like 10msg/sec or something ludicrously low.
At something like $100/node and 5000 nodes in a major metro (eg: Dallas) it's like a $500k investment and you're maxed out at low data rates and saturated topology.
That's 5k nodes in a (generous) 5 million population and ~500 square mile area. More like 9M people and 9000 square miles. (I checked, and that's "extended metroplex", but reasonable: Decatur to Cleburne, Weatherford to Kaufman).
At 5k nodes saturating an area, it's basically a rich persons toy very well suitable to remote or low-density areas, but NEVER for 1:1 saturation deployment in any sort of high density area.
Well, someone is a negative nelly.
>comically weak
This has been said about every interchange technology, ever. Doesn’t matter, still EOF’ed.
>trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
.. well, scale is a matter of one thing: location, location, location ...
>range
.. is an end-user value decision, as in, you might think its too slow for your browsing needs, but there are a thousand applications that will use the bandwidth offered to the average user, at the average users own personal speed, according to the needs of the average user.
Just like in the good ol’ days of soggy noodle internetworking, the current zeitgeist apropos mesh-based local low-power radio technology, is entirely ruled by the user.
Case in point: some friends and I have deployed our own small Meshtastic network, and we use it exclusively to organize our social network. This particular use case isn’t particularly ‘easily’ exploitable by third parties, since we have some modicum of encryption - but it certainly supports our need here and now in a big city - but, more importantly some of us will take the little lovely boxes with them when they go sailing next week, and our range will be significantly extended for the purpose …
>Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
If you need solar, build a meshcore node with solar.
Nay-saying like this is as old as the hills, there’s nothing special about it, everyone does it…
> the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
Isn't it the case with Meshtastic and Reticulum too? It feels like it should be part of the definition of mesh network.
> 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.
Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
A swarm of millions of devices (that can be solar powered) could be more resilient than the "few" nodes that the "internet" architecture has. I guess that is the motivation, in theory.
Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
> Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
Not sure why people are so hyper-focused on the La Liga case in Spain, Spain done so much worse censorship, even political one, yet no one seemingly bats an eye. But some IPs getting blocks because Cloudflare doesn't follow Spanish law? Suddenly half of HN cares about it, it makes no sense...
How about when a Women's rights website started being blocked in Spain? (https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/womens-rights-we...) How about the Gag Law that existed since 2015, limiting public demonstrations? How about when the central government prevented an "autonomous" region from even thinking about having a referendum? How about the laws against "insulting" the crown?
Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
There has been so much censorship here, so much more important censorship than some random piracy stream websites going offline, yet not a single person here seems to remember those more important cases, just as long as a US company involved, then suddenly it's important and worth referencing.
Freedom on the world wide web and the public internet been kind of hanging by a thread for multiple decades at this point, and I'm also on the side of "We need new physical infrastructure if we're gonna have a chance".
Meshtastic, Guifi, Freifunk, NYCMesh and more are wonderful efforts that hopefully at one point can group together, we all have more or less the same ideas and same goals, right now it's all separate networks though.
> Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
I didn't know about this, so I looked it up: it's because they sell prescription-only abortion medication and ship directly to consumers, where it's legally only available via prescription and medical oversight. Fundamentally they're blocked for ignoring medical regulations. There were some appeals, but the argument is that access to abortion medication is already a well-protected right, so that this is dangerous and unnecessary, and it's not possible to block that while unblocking the rest of their educational resources.
Such a bullshit reason though, the real reason is that the church don't like women deciding over their own bodies, and the church wields real political power in Spain.
Using a VPN, and trying to use that website to "order abortion pills" today to Spain shows this error:
> You live in a country where there is access to safe abortion services. We don't provide services in your country and we therefore are unable to assist you.
You haven't been able to get abortion pills from them for years, yet the same reason for the block remains, even if that's not actually true in practice.
The block is being escalated to UN though, so it's still an ongoing issue, not like nothing is happening, just frustrating to see people complaining about minor censorship when there is so much more important censorship happening all the time.
> no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what
Can't they just triangulate the nodes and hack or unplug them? And put whoever objects into prison?
Meshtastic/core are very easy to disrupt or jam, anyway.
I’ve spent my entire career in telco and networking and loved the rise of Wi-Fi (which we used spectacularly over long distances when the spectrum was clear to show off my mates in 3G/microwave backhaul), and have been keeping up with LoRA and related stuff (got a few HelTec boards), but all the recent meshtastic/core/etc. stuff feels a bit like the early wardriving community (and CB radio): fun, full of ideas, but without enough structure (or mass appeal) to take off.
I do wish we had a proper, working emergency meshing standard, though. An international one, too.
> but without enough structure (or mass appeal) to take off
I think the most important requirement for a mesh technology to take off is a purpose that is practically relevant right now. Let's assume the mesh network exists - now what? Now you can send messages to other nerds but ... what do you even want to send as a message? That's why ham radio basically bottomed out at contests, Morse code challenges and exchanging specs ... there is nothing to say. Maybe the biggest problem of mesh networks isn't technology but society. If there is a purpose that at least serves nerds making up 0.1% of the population then that would be amazing and mass appeal would actually be more cause for trouble than desirable.
Off-grid messaging is helpful for my family (skiing, camping, hiking). They have zero interest in ham radio but a funny looking messaging app isn't a problem. Regular walkies talkies (FRS, GMRS) don't relay/hop, work asynchronously, or transmit GPS positions.
It's the same problem with things like Geminispace, or hobbyist phone networks. The only thing Gemini users have in common is hating what the internet has become. The only thing TandmX users have in common is some interest in phones or phone systems.
But on the other hand, isn't it also true of the Internet?
Yeah, nobody wants to chew the rag anymore!
I had a friend who worked in telco as well, and he told me the reason why IP-based networking solutions will never completely replace earlier stuff like GSM is that the QoS algorithms used work extremely well in practice (which mesh networks prove), their behavior is completely nondeterministic, and tends to have really bad failure cases in overload, or certain nodes in the network failing.
Which means in SHTF situations (such as one when most people imagine this would be useful), these things tend to fail the most.
LoRA can work but there needs to be a backbone, either terrestrially via towers with repeaters or LEO constellations. Everything else is doomed to fail.
I believe it's called ham radio
CB stands for Citizen's Band, and was the moniker back in the Usenet days. Yes, I know I am dating myself here.
Yes, and ham radio is the international emergency mesh. CB radio isn't.
The request was for "a proper, working emergency meshing standard". Ham radio absolutely is not that. Yes, ham radios are used in emergency situations, but usually not as a mesh and certainly not as a standard.
“Mesh” doesn’t even make sense wrt ham. Aren’t hams just people broadcasting voice with amplitude modulation? Is there a data band? If so, are any hams willing to relay?
My uncle definitely had a CB radio in his big rig, not ham, to hear him describe it.
Really interesting to see that the ham radio spectrum prohibits encryption.
>To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post.
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.
That weakness is a strength.
Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
How many places like that are left?
> Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.
Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out
The problem is that takes up valuable airtime. The denser the mesh the more airtime is wasted on the junk.
I run a few Meshcore nodes in Toronto - mostly as a nerd hobby. In some ways it has the feel of the 1990s internet and in some ways it's the same feel as ham radio . It has smart nerds, but also some unhinged people who are desperate to force people to hear them. Then there are the trolls...
All unmoderated spaces have this problem. That's why the right wing grew so much on gaming forums, because they were extremely unmoderated.
A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g
It's well suited for that at the moment, yeah - if that's what you're hoping to find by getting into it, it's pretty cheap and now's a great time.
I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.
I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes.
I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.
The inherent limitations of free spectrum mesh technologies will never lend itself to a replacement for the Internet so will always largely exist in niches. Niches like personal nets, local nerd networks, or emergency response (tho actual first responders are not the most eager to try this stuff based on my experiences in the community.) All of this can be a feature or a bug depending on whom you ask.
On the mesh in Toronto with meshcore we have regular communication that reach all the way to Buffalo. We are past the « toy » stage, it’s truly impressive.
The Salish Mesh over here on the west coast also gets some pretty good range, though there are lots of holes in the network
Meshcore seems a lot better thought out in that respect, yea. Flood routing is a very-well-known dead-end.
Meshtastic was never designed to be a wide mesh, it was originally meant for personal networks.
This is by design. It’s like BBS again
Amateur Ham technicians were doing packet radio long before (AX.25) the Internet made it into homes. =3
https://aprs.world/
It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet.
I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network.
Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not.
I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale.
To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work!
*disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!
I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory
I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.
I don't know man, I was just trying to follow the official build instructions. If that's not Meshtastic I don't know what is.
The (lack of) reliability in the network is the main issue with it though, but that's already been covered elsewhere in this thread.
One aspect of MeshCore and similar technologies I really like is that the end user devices can directly communicate with each other seamlessly - if you have 2 MeshCore companions nearby, they can just send messages directly, no need for a repeater.
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 wonder what you are suggesting cell phones should be able to do here?
This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.
The issue is that these mesh protocols quickly break down under any real loads.
Setting up a few mesh nodes, running some tests, and thinking you have a kit that is usable in an emergency is like so many other "disaster recovery" drills we've been through that assume ideal conditions. The excellent daily tape backups that you realize too late you can't utilize in a bare metal recovery situation because nobody kept an OS install media handy, or they forgot to keep the installer and license keys for the backup software in the datacenter.
The challenge with these mesh systems is that few, if any, areas have even gotten to a point that they could run a realistic simulation of relying on this system for communications.
In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me. Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app. On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh.
I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
I have difficulty following you.
> a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Why? WiFi technology is cheap and available. Seems like a great basis for a mesh.
> Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
Why "just"? All the internet protocols are also just messaging at the end of the day - request: A sends message to B, response: B sends message to A.
> On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff
I'm not familiar with Reticulum (neither with Mesh* in any meaningful way) - do you mean to say that Reticulum is more flexible regarding the radio technology - as in: no need to by specific devices like for Meshcore?
> I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
Can't say I disagree, sadly.
I am an happy user of Meshstastic since more than one year (I have two active nodes and a third one is in the making). I am living in hilly countryside and the difficult that I have experienced is about reaching other nodes: with the standard antenna, I can barely connect with nodes in a 500 meters range, with a better antenna (coaxial collinear is the best IMHO) I can reach more than 10km.
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
None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, AODV-esque routing (which MeshCore tries to do for DMs and Reticulum tries to do in general) is prone to almost-immediate path failure on unstable underlying transports, and the hidden node problem always bites on haphazard/unplanned mesh radio deployments where people show up with nodes in random locations on the same frequency.
The cracks are already extremely visible in MeshCore in the UK, where overheads from adverts and dropped packets from collisions mean it is already horrendously unreliable and most of the chatter in the Public channel is people sending test messages and being unsure whether anything they sent was ever heard by anyone.
Most other routing protocols (BATMAN included) are also not that well suited to situations where the underlying transport ends up asymmetric, e.g. one node can't hear others but it can be heard, and that's an extremely common occurrence/failure mode in wireless meshes like this. It's a difficult problem to solve with coordination between nodes, let alone without.
You have two conditions: not dense enough or too dense and the fractal nature of population mean you can have both. Radio bandwidth is a precious resource and if you think somehow that anything good will come out of sending a packet N times you are not likely to manage a wireless network successfully.
There are systems like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...
But they are pretty specialized and not that scalable
Agree! And we need also to consider that a mesh protocol for Meshtatic/Meshcore should support mobility and have to run in a low power devices
Any promising mesh networks, radio networks or routing protocols worth looking into?
Set up solar nodes last weekend. 200 miles of range now. Nerds, mad ideas. Good times.
Did you set up solar nodes in random spots or only areas you own/control?
I've wondered if it'd be legal to just chuck a couple into some random trees.
And when the temperature drops below zero?
What do you need 200 miles of range for?
Personally I find it very satisfying to get long near-line-of-site performance in VHF and up. That could be reaching a repeater 100+ miles away on two meters with a handheld and a tape measure yagi
https://www.jpole-antenna.com/2017/02/07/build-it-2-meter-ta...
or talking to somebody with a bigger station 300+ miles away because of a tropospheric duct or just getting into the WiFi at the hospital from the other side of the lake.
RTO
what does that stand for?
Return To Office
Radio Transmission Optimization
Restarting The Oracle
Round Trip Orbit
Reach The Others
Race The Otter
Reading The Onion
Reno To Oakland
Racing Towards Oblivion
Zombies
Not having great luck with my solar node. Nothing ever seems to get out, even with a pretty nice antenna...
Wrong antenna for the frequency?
After seeing the Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467 I wonder if they would pair well with Reticulum
These ideas yes, but these networks already have a concept of message oriented semantics and so there's not much of a need to rebuild most of those protocols. A lot of what Finger, Gopher, et al does is define the application layer semantics to transmit documents over stream oriented protocols.
A lot of the "early internet" protocols would likely pair quite well, especially ones based on UDP.
However, Reticulum has its own active "small web" implementation with NomadNet and the Micron markup.
Please someone design a worldwide mesh network. Mix of wireless and wired links.
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.
Isn't that exactly the idea of Reticulum?
http://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html
The author seems to prefer Reticulum.
I’ve looked at this stuff, because of its utility as an emergency communication system.
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).
For emergency comms(remember, emergency services provided by the state don't monitor the ham bands, so can't call them), a $20 ham radio would work or just carry FRS radios.
FCC does allow use of a ham radio in a real emergency without a license.
I just started trying Meshtastic last month, there's nobody doing it in my city so it's just me giving esp32s to friends to try to make a mesh, but I'm getting into range limitations because I don't know enough people to bridge some gaps !
I even tried changing the radio preset to Very slow Long for example, but I didn't really get better range, I don't know why.
I really like LoRa and its range, but unfortunately the hardware is much more expensive than e.g. Zigbee or WiFi devices.
Would love a LoRaWAN router but they run around ~80€/80$ and just for playing around with it it is a bit much.
You can build one with an SX1302/SX1250 and an STM MC for cheap.
I was the first to setup a Meshcore room server in my city. New I get pings from all over the place and it's busy. It seems to be extremely popular in Switzerland for some reason.
Meshtastic and MQTT are part of my home network
https://openwrt.meshtastic.org/
Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.
Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!
I have a very different experience - here in Europe with 868 MHz MeshCore you get good singnal from a repeater through one or two city blocks with non ideal antenna placement.
With reasonable line of sight tens of kilometers & much more is doable. There are some repeaters on mountains that connect bigger regional meshes with packets going >100 km regularly.
https://mapa.meshcore.cz/
WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...
I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete.
915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
it works incredibly well at Burning Man, so you are completely right!
https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum is the official mirror for reticulum
Official manual including install instructions: https://markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/
Saw this at https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-net... and thought it was interesting
Does 802.11p work in any of these mesh networks? It could amplify their usefulness.
Reticulum would probably be the best one for it. As far as I can tell there aren't any interfaces for it already, but if you can get a command that transfers data using stdin and sdtout, Reticulum has things like the PipeInterface https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html
Just to throw in my experience, got 2 RAK19007 after the last HN post. Mostly just for me and my kid to play with. He took an interest in Flipper Zero recently and Mestastic seems like a fun expansion on that interest. In the Western NY area, about a week up and running, devices just sitting on my desk, I've got a node list of 215, and I've communicated with people from Rochester to Canada.
I'd pivot over to the MANET folks (https://openmanet.net/). The 900MHz HaLow stuff is exciting to see on the data front for some moderate-speed data connectivity.
(It's basically an open source version of an MPU-5, basically. https://persistentsystems.com/mpu5/)
In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks.
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.
Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.
HaLow is just Wi-Fi on sub-1GHz frequencies and narrower channels. You get normal MTUs and TCP & UDP work just fine.
I think there are people playing with Halow with Reticulum. That's one advantage of having a multi-transport system. There is also a Bluetooth transport now: https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720
Am I the only one who thinks MeshCore shouldn’t be called „off grid“?
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…
No, you're not alone. MeshCore is very neat tech, but I love that you can show up to, say, a music fest with a few Meshtastic radios and voila, instant mesh. To me, it feels more in the spirit of the thing. That's purely subjective, but that's how I see it.
You totally can use Meshcore without repeater, and companions can be used like routers. This functionality can be enabled any time using one checkbox in app. It switches the radios to slightly different frequency and enables repeat mode in personal nodes, this gives you one small network. No repeater needed. And in this mode you don't clutter "main" mesh with your local mesh.
The main difference between Meshcore and Meshtastic is how telemetry is handled. In Meshcore to get telemetry the other party needs to request it, whereas in Meshtastic telemetry is sent in flood mode in configured intervals. That's why Meshtastic is better suited for (A)TAK [1]. But because Meshtastic sends telemetry anyway there is less and less airtime for chat messages, and it gets to the point where you can't talk to people. For small groups this is fine, for bigger groups/meshes this is no bueno.
[1] https://tak.gov/ - (A) stands for Android app.
„main“ mesh IS „the grid“
If I have to modify settings and effectively kick myself off the mesh, then it doesn’t matter which protocol I use. By the same logic, you can just choose different settings on Meshtastic and get the same results, but you will not have anyone to mesh with.
I got into it too back in 2012. Frankly it’s not a very interesting space unless you’re trying to circumvent nation wide internet shutdowns because for everything else encrypted chat channels serve the same purpose and everyone is doing it (WhatsApp, signal, telegram etc)
I have some really bad news for you, mate.
What is it?