[rta5]

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.

[MiracleRabbit]

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)

[WhyNotHugo]

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.

[brk]

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.

[MiracleRabbit]

For sensor stuff use LoRaWAN + Mirotik Basestation + Chirpstack

[lgcmo]

I really like the technology and almost jumped in, but quickly realized the lack of the _network_ effect in a community.

I live in a dense urban area, and yet I see very few nodes nearby, where I image I will be left in starvation. Without a proper mesh, I couldn't send a message to a fried 2 miles away with no los.

[m4rtink]

Well, here in the Czech Republic we managed to cover all the main urban centers with MeshCore in less than one year:

https://analyzer.meshcore.cz/#/live

I can send a message to a friend in Prague with my MeshCore companion, it goes via the MeshCore repeater I have on my balcony which forwards the message to the local city mesh. Then it goes over various repeaters, usually on hills, to the Prague city mesh & reaches the friends companion. It usually takes about 8 to 10 hops, covering 200-400 km, based on the path taken.

[turbine401]

Have you tried MeshCore? It seems there's a lot more people on it (at least here in Europe).