I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere!
Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!
Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.
Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.
You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
To me, one of the most interesting parts of Meshtastic is the Websphere MQ roots of MQTT and all the goodness of observability and data analysis that comes from an open message broker.
Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh
I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama.
For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it.
Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones.
Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows.
They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..
Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).
The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.
As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
Love meshtastic. There’s something about the setup friction that has the vibe of early internet, select community, high signal, nobody trying to monetize your attention.
I took a plunge into learning about mesh networks, specifically because I love the idea of p2p/decentralized systems of communication. To be honest, I was surprised to find that my expectations for “where we are at” with this type of technology was pretty off-base. For some reason I thought by now it would be straightforward to do a little more than text messaging over a truly public and decentralized off-internet mesh. Maybe I’ve missed some things in my search (still learning!) and someone can correct my understanding.
The Reticulum Network Stack is a more generic lora capable protocol. It is intended to run over almost any two way link so it's less bandwidth efficient per packet than Meshtastic but in return it gives you packet routing rather than flooding. It can be run over TCP, LoRa, WiFi, etc.
There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide
This is awesome. I love that people are working on this. I wish for the day I can own a box that boots up, and gives me the 90s-00s internet experience without needing to ask permission from a bunch of middlemen.
I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs.
It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
I have a node running 24/7 (I also happen to be hosting one of the dozen or so things network nodes in my city) and while the idea is great, the adoption is close to 0. In a city with a 2+ million residents, I see a handful of users, as in less than 10. Same with the things network actually.
If you setup meshtastic for the love of all that is holy reindex your channels so the public channel is 1 instead of 0. Range tests default to 0. The public channel in my area is regularly spammed with range test and is useless for any meaningful "community" communication. Instructions https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
To be fair, the hop limit has to die somewhere. It's an intricate balancing act of causing packet storms vs failure to deliver messages.
6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient.
Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times.
Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters.
My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet.
Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent.
I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved.
I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested.
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere!
Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!
Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.
Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.
You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Digital Radio Hobbying, think HAM radio but with a microcontroller and apps.
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".
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.
To me, one of the most interesting parts of Meshtastic is the Websphere MQ roots of MQTT and all the goodness of observability and data analysis that comes from an open message broker.
Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh
There was apparently drama, should we be using this or meshcore?
I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama.
For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it.
Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones.
Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
the merits of one are largely vibe-coded by one overly enthusiastic guy.
This is the first I've heard of it so I guess its not a real project then.
Somewhat related thread from the past days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 that also discusses Reticulum which is an interesting project in the same space too.
From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows.
They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..
Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).
The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.
As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
Love meshtastic. There’s something about the setup friction that has the vibe of early internet, select community, high signal, nobody trying to monetize your attention.
Agreed. And opt-in. Early internet access required some knowledge about computers.
I took a plunge into learning about mesh networks, specifically because I love the idea of p2p/decentralized systems of communication. To be honest, I was surprised to find that my expectations for “where we are at” with this type of technology was pretty off-base. For some reason I thought by now it would be straightforward to do a little more than text messaging over a truly public and decentralized off-internet mesh. Maybe I’ve missed some things in my search (still learning!) and someone can correct my understanding.
The Reticulum Network Stack is a more generic lora capable protocol. It is intended to run over almost any two way link so it's less bandwidth efficient per packet than Meshtastic but in return it gives you packet routing rather than flooding. It can be run over TCP, LoRa, WiFi, etc.
https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect.
There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide
If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.
Reticulum has more to offer, it’s just not the welcome mat/filter the others are.
Chit-chat is one thing.
This is awesome. I love that people are working on this. I wish for the day I can own a box that boots up, and gives me the 90s-00s internet experience without needing to ask permission from a bunch of middlemen.
You can create a network tunnel over meshtastic with the CLI. I haven't had the time to try it but I assume it's quite slow.
I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs.
It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.
Same. The internet isn’t fun anymore, and hasn’t been in a long time.
These local meshes remind me of BBS days. You have to know a few things to access it and the community is all the better for it.
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
https://meshmap.net
https://www.meshcoretel.ru/en/MOW/map
Maybe other maps too...
I thing Russia's main problem (not only with mesh) is that you have millions of people living in or near few cities and very few inbetween.
And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
Put one of these onto the hill and you might have more luck: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html
You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/
I don't own the hill and there are people living on it, and I don't particularly want to hang up nodes on council property or worse, private property
Are you trying about cross-border communication in event where the internet is somehow blocked near the border?
I have a node running 24/7 (I also happen to be hosting one of the dozen or so things network nodes in my city) and while the idea is great, the adoption is close to 0. In a city with a 2+ million residents, I see a handful of users, as in less than 10. Same with the things network actually.
If you setup meshtastic for the love of all that is holy reindex your channels so the public channel is 1 instead of 0. Range tests default to 0. The public channel in my area is regularly spammed with range test and is useless for any meaningful "community" communication. Instructions https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
Has this issue been reported? It seems like an obvious design flaw.
Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
I'd expect a group that cared about privacy and security... not to need a cookie consent dialog like that.
I find it weird that the hop limit is 3 bits, wouldn't that limit the effective range a lot?
Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
To be fair, the hop limit has to die somewhere. It's an intricate balancing act of causing packet storms vs failure to deliver messages.
6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient.
Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
It's flood routed. 3 bits is probably far past what is practical, except in very linear low-node-count networks.
Yeah, I was expecting something fancier than flood routing.
Perhaps a per node hash of known recent routes to avoid flooding every single time and using flooding as a backup.
I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times.
Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters.
My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet.
Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent.
I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved.
I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested.
KR4KZI 73
Comparison of Meshtastic vs MeshCore:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...
And why MeshCore forked from Meshtastic:
https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split
That article seems to be about how Meshcore split into two, with one contributor forking the code and taking the previously official website with him.
There's no mention of Meshtastic.
HN is the home of the confidently incorrect.
MeshCore didn’t “fork” from Meshtastic. Meshtastic is a lost cause, with toxic incompetent devs.
Nor did it fork from itself. The official website/discord changed, and the community abandoned a cuck of a human being.
You’d know that if you had the ability to read, but clearly you don’t. I just realized you won’t be able to read this either. Sad.
I wish they'd mention CellSol but eh.
https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol
You wish Meshtatstic would mention CellSol on the Meshtatstic website? Why would they do that?
Definitely interesting for special use cases. But I don't think the wireless carriers have anything to worry about here.
Some software needs to be refactored and vibe coded, this is the prime example of that.
As someone interested in 3D and geometry but with no interest in radio - I find the naming clash most irritating!
If only I had a penny for every HN comment about naming conflicts.