A few quick notes: yes, we did go back to 'Long Fast' instead of 'Very Long Slow', as most of the nodes in the wild seem to stick to the default. I also wrote up more thoughts and a guide for others wanting to get into Meshtastic on my blog: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/getting-started-meshtastic
As a router guy, you'll appreciate the England crowd has switched to Medium Fast, and big events with lots of nodes became unusable, but that's the routing/mesh, not the tech. More router geeks needed to figure out scaling issues.
The blog post is quite helpful, thank you. Looks like an interesting little rabbit hole to explore - luckily it does not appear to be too expensive to at least dabble with a few of the basic devices.
I just wanted to say that at 8:56 you used a blur effect which apparently according to a clip from piratesoftware that can be undone and its better to use black bars instead. I just wanted to give you a heads up and might be something you might like to look into.
@@SethCohn23 I was just reading the release notes on meshtastic 2.4.0 and it looks like there is already work going on to improve high-density performance
I dunno if this sounds silly, but I appreciate the quiet conversation, talking about a product. No music or loud talking about whatever. I can just pop this on while I empty this dishwasher and it’s calm.
@@SpaceJazz3K You would have to set up the clients to be mute and run it like a traditional cell network only having routers doing the repeating but, that kind of goes against the spirit. The problem is that Meshtastic uses flood messaging so many people in a small area would just clog up the bandwidth by every node repeating. There are however other ways to use LoRa that isn't Meshtastic, reticulum for example is a network stack that works over anything and handles routing pretty well but, you'd have to build an actual network if you wanted it to work well enough off of the internet.
I suppose it could be concealed as one... if you have some odd reason to conceal it, maybe you find it easier explaining how you like making funny clouds than what meshtastic is?
Meshtastic currently uses "flood" routing, which (simplified) means every node on a "channel" gets every message and forwards that message to other nodes. This is easy to implement and conceptualize but has inherent limits to mesh size. There are other more sophisticated mesh routing topologies which can grow mesh networks much larger, but are of course more complex and take more state memory on nodes (which on some meshtastic devices is in short supply).
@@InternetUser999 Similar, yes. But worse, because instead of just the hub repeating, every node on the network repeats, just in case somebody didn't hear it.
@@InternetUser999 Exactly. That redundancy uses a lot of bandwidth (very limited resource for LORA) and that becomes a major limiting factor to mesh size. Perhaps they'll implement the concept of master nodes (like a hub) or some other "smarter, still reliable but less bandwidth" routing.
Please keep doing more on this subject. Digital communication using ham bands would definitely be a reason I would get a license, but the bandwidth and range always seemed too low to make it useful. Would love to see some actual data.
Ham radio packet satellites, store and forward topology gives you world wide messaging... ISS has a node I do believe... And ham radio has a slew of digital modes from simple keyboard to keyboard(PSK31, RTTY) to extreme weak signal pass very little info modes(FT8/FT4). WSJT is a weak signal program with several modes(FT8 is one) that I use to bounce signals off the moon! And the FCC recently changed the rules on digital, instead of fixed baud rates it is now fit in a 3khz bandwidth so I expect more new digital modes to come!
Winlink is a cool technology too for sending emails over only RF. Works on HF for worldwide use and VHF for local. But it’s predominantly email ( non-commercial since it’s using ham bands).
I really need to get my ham license. For a long time I had the excuse that it was difficult to get to an examiner on public transit. I've had a car for 8 years now... 🙃 I was going to request my granddad's call sign but I suppose now I'll be requesting my dad's
You can transmit full HD video if you wanted to using ham radio. Folk do it as part of ARTV setups, range well that depends on a lot of factors. Bandwidth is dependent on frequency. Higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth, which naturally means the higher the frequency the more you need line of sight (or tropospheric ducting), but thankfully... there is a solution. As we have things like QO-100 which is a geostationary satellite capable of repeating amateur radio TV broadcasts across a large part of EMEA. Ham radio is a crazy big hobby with lots of fields and options.
Jeff, just a gentle reminder that many people including myself really appreciate the subtitles you put in your videos. This is really interesting tech though!
Put my node up on the roof a few weeks ago and built up a T-Deck. Tucson has a thriving Meshtastic community with lots of nodes and several high profile nodes that give excellent coverage.
@@noliver7913 There is a path to Phoenix but seems to be mostly east side nodes. I've yet to be able to get a traceroute through. My roof node is MBKR.
Back in 2008 or so, my friend and I pondered how well a local neighborhood mesh network could work based on equipping (implanting, even) nodes on neighborhood cats, using kinetic power recovery. Low bandwidth, obviously, but could be useful for signalling and/or location. My memory's hazy though... considering the idea, I think you can guess why.
For most people, the range is going to be a couple miles "at most" unless you have the antenna placed up very high to give another node line-of-sight to it in my experience (been running a couple nodes since April). In the Hampton Roads region (Virginia), I did get a connection to a boater's node in the Chesapeake Bay 13 Miles away from my node (LOS, no hops), but it's not the norm for these ranges (and I haven't seen that node in a few months now). Most nodes that connect my node is about 1/2 mile away before I loose connection. For my base node, I am using the Heltec V3 and the Rokland 8.5 dBi Omni Outdoor Helium 915 MHz Antenna (40 in) mounted in my attic space (would mount on roof but got solar panels in the way so its the 2nd best place I can put it).
@@edwardfletcher7790 90%??? Sir, you don't know what's going on because you don't even know what you're talking about... The "majority" of meshtastic users report similar or less range on average than what i reported.. Most dont bother getting a good antenna and/or place it in a good location for their nodes. This comes from multiple meshtastic communities that I've watched. Its the minority that gets better range than my own. Ones that will take the time and effort to get the best ranges for their setup. Certainly not the 90% that you claim... On top of that, i said MOST nodes, Not ALL nodes connect to my node at a 1/2 mile range. I do get the occasional direct node connection 2 to 3 miles away which is great range for my setup and area. (Antenna in attic space and live in a flat, coastal, urban area). It just the vast majority of direct, LoS connections to my node are about 1/2 mile range. Probably from the actual majority of meshtastic users that are using a crappy stock antenna with poor placement.
@@warmon6 You're must be in an environment with lots of tall buildings or something,. The experience of people using these in a normal suburban setting is much better..
@@edwardfletcher7790 sir... When you've already been caught lying and not knowing what you're talking about... Anything you say beyond that point can't be believed. Everything I've claimed has been proven by others in various meshtastic communities. Discourse, reddit, and even youtube. I dont know what you're trying to compare it to but I'm sure it's not a realistic comparison.
Here in the Kansas City metro we have over 70 nodes just in the southern part of the metro alone. I'm thinking of throwing up a dedicated client node hooked up to a TC2-BBS docker container on one of my servers.
I’m so glad to see you do this Jeff. I’ve only just recently learned about Meshtastic and I’ve been curious to know more but didn’t know where to start.
We had 150+ Meshtastic devices all communicating at Hamvention. It was kinda a mess. LOL. I'll put mime up in STL city and see if I can mesh with others in STL.
@@AA0Z Ah, I think the biggest issue is there's a small hill between me and you along the train tracks that go over Watson. I need to get a little height!
@@DanSaettele Would be fun to plug one in and see if you can find any other nodes. My Dad's been driving around to tower sites and has made contact with about 10 nodes now.
People in UK (so 10% duty cycle max as required by law causing oversaturation problems) are troubling with meshtastic reliability. Messages get lost, you don't get info on why and so on. People tried to use it at some convention (I think it was in USA) - it failed miserably due too much nodes in one place. Here my meshtastic devices haven't seen single other meshtatsic user so far (there are some > 10km away but that's not in reach due to woods/hills). Fun project, fun to play with it but we have to wait for a lot more development for more serious uses.
Definitely - seems like there needs to be more saturation overall, and less use in densely-packed environments (and/or some routing updates in firmware to make it so more nodes can mesh without stampeding).
I was wondering when you were going to get to this tech. A lot of the boards can be attached easily to a pi zero for example, which offers endless possibilities for remote communication or remote control.
Thanks Jeff. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get some of these. With the recent Hurricane here in the Houston area, these would have come in handy for local comms when the cells started going down with the winds first the. The downed power lines later.
Thanks, Jeff! This looks like fun! I just turned 68 and was struggling to think of something I wanted for my birthday. Just ordered two devices to play with. That should keep me out of the bingo parlor for a bit! :)
@@GeerlingEngineering LOL! I live in Las Vegas too! I wonder... would a casino install a node for us? Nah, that's crazy talk. I did mess about with Mesh on the ham bands and had great luck testing out in Red Rock Canyon. I went to the overlook which is around mile 7 or so of the Scenic Drive at 5,000 feet. My buddy went to the parking area near the exit of the Scenic Drive just off the main road. We were able to transmit video successfully, and there's an app called MeshChat that seems pretty useful. I also have a Pi with PBX software and some adapters that turn analog phones into digital phones and we made VOIP calls over the mesh successfully as well. The problem is that we need mountaintop nodes for a backbone and they're hard to come by. We do have an active mesh group here which I plan to rejoin. I had to take a hiatus when my wife had a stroke 3 years ago. She's now doing much better and I can start gettng back into this kind of stuff. Check out Orange County CA's mesh page and the stuff they've done with instrumenting parades. Looks like their website is getting a makeover at sites.google.com/view/ocmesh/home
Hey, great to see this here! mesh networking is super cool and can be extremely useful. I made an 802.11 mesh network over the amateur radio S-Band a few years ago. You can use off the shelf WRT-54g routers to do it. Pretty great fun when paired with ultra-high gain directional antennas. I was getting several kilometers without much effort. 73 de WU2F
We have acreage and got 2 meshtastic nodes so far. I plan on getting 3 more with standalone keyboards for our kids and want to set up some repeaters for expanded coverage.
so great to see that you are covering this meshtastic is really interesting and i had been for around one or two weeks thinking on buying a LoRA antenna to connect to my RPI Zero that i already have, or maybe buy just one of those kits with a board, a LoRA module, an antenna and having built in also the wifi and bluetooth modules (like a esp32)
I think this is an excellent option for disaster prone areas(hurricanes, tornados, earth quakes) but it's so young that getting the coverage is a challenge. Right now there are ~123 nodes in Florida as a whole. I'm not sure that's enough coverage if a disaster hits.
I l live in FL and agree there is essentially no coverage here. I'm a pilot and bring the device to my overnights around the country just to sample how many nodes exist in various cities. Knoxville TN surprised me at the number of nodes reachable via LoRA. II was receiving messages stretching up and down the mountains from Knoxville to Chattanooga. I messaged some folks there and they said that hams have been instrumental at expanding the relay nodes on their towers. In other words, without the help of routers / repeaters with antennas up high, these devices will have very limited line-of-sight range, particularly in the 900Mhz band.
I may be in the metro east. I have been planning on building a node system between my near family. Look for mine to pop up, I want to reach St.Charles.
You are venturing into @AndreasSpiess territory with this one. He is quite a fan of LoRa and mesh networking and of course all his other electronics projects. As he is in Switzerland that is perhaps a little to far to connect your LoRa devices.
Ha! Unless we can do a moon bounce, or I can pop some satellites up, I don't think we'll make direct contact with Andreas. Love watching his experiments with radio!
Range is by line of sight. So if you can't cover one end of town to the other end...try driving out of town to a hill/mountain and you'll be shocked to know it will still work with stock antenna's. So basically just like phone towers it's location....location...location all you need is one high node to help everyone else down on the ground.
The guys over in the UK have found that when you get a great number of nodes, things start to fail. Also that you can't message outside of the nodes that you can see, at least how they have things setup. MQTT can really clog your mesh with messages. I was thinking about putting a node or repeater at my house, we are pretty high on a hill and would be able to have good reach if I built it for outside use (probably solar with battery).
There’s quite a big community for this in the UK, unfortunately it seems the more nodes you have the less chance there is of a message being delivered…there doesn’t appear to be any verification for successful delivery.
Just getting started with Meshtastic myself. Our plan is to equip them with environment sensors and use them primarily for remote temperature, voltage/ current (solar battery status), etc. I’m in St. Charles and don’t see any other nodes unless I raise one up pretty high in the air. I’ll watch for your nodes. - N0SO
Mesh networks require either mountains or sky scrapers with access to roofs. Line of sight with power usually isn't possible in most geographies without spending lots of money (ie, cell towers). They're kind of a niche technology.
Depending on the device, a few watts of solar and a couple of vape batteries is all the power you need for these things. Look for the RAK Wisblock boards if you want super low power. The Heltec v3 stuff works, but it needs more juice. Though yes it is somewhat niche. You won't be sharing videos, but it's good for short messages and telemetry data.
I wonder if I could use that to put sensors in the chicken coop way outside and have it talk to my network downstairs...? Very interesting. Dumb home assistant thoughts aside, this seems like a really neat device to just have chill around and about and observe what happens and what messages come in. Super neat!
A few people use it for that kind of purpose - you can run your own MQTT server and have data route through that. LoRaWAN also has a lot of integrations for that too (outside of Meshtastic, which is just using the LoRa part).
this seems like something that would be a neat project for students to work on. you got a lot of nerds so setting up a city ought to be easy enough and with more effort, maybe even close by areas if not other cities!
I have been keen on really testing some of the different boards for use in a MANET configuration. I know that there is a decent sized community around the ATAK integration.
A flea market my brother and I frequent has virtually no service. I’d love to be able to split up and still send each other pictures and messages. Even better: Tether Internet service if one or the other happens to have Internet service so we can look up prices. I bet we could even convince one of the vendors who has service to hold onto a node.
I live downtown and am interested in setting up a Meshtastic node. I live at Tucker and Washington and could talk with our condo board about having a node on our roof. It’s 10 stories up and if on the roof could provide line of site to parts of north city
Ooh, that'd be nice! I haven't seen _anything_ north of Market. A node here or there in south city but that's it. It'd be great to get a little coverage up high downtown, I could maybe hit it at CITYPARK for a St. Louis City SC match!
When all else fails: Amateur Radio. In the days following 9/11, we kept communication flowing in lower Manhattan when/where cellphones didn't work reliably. Gave the repeater on the Chrysler building a workout! This looks pretty neat, might have to check it out... But I question their claims of 158 mile record - I can't see how something on 915Mhz, at such a low power, could travel that far between two single nodes. I wonder if these nodes could make it 30 miles in the St Louis urban jungle? There's a node not too far from me in the LSL area.
Looks like we are re-inventing local Packet radio, it was extremely popular 30 years ago on both VHF and HF, but really started falling off the last 10 years or so.
I could imagine this being useful for sending messages between the house and sleepout, as mobile is unreliable in the valley I live in, despite only being ~5km from town, hah.
Meshtastic is cool. It was however broken at Hamvemtion this year. TOO many nodes in one spot. Couldn’t get messages out due to node announcement, handshake.
I’ll definately be checking into how best to coordinate. As someone who grew version 1 Ethernet using hubs (before switches were available) the network would really slow to a crawl if too many machines talked a lot of data at the same time. Some evolution will likely be required here, maybe a slightly more expensive device because of the memory it may need.
The software is open source, but it runs on top of LoRa radio chips, which are getting very cheap, but Semtech does 'own' the LoRa protocol and licenses it out to third parties. To be honest, though, neither of us are experts on how the protocol works, we'd defer to others to talk more on how well Semtech, the Meshtastic community, etc. play with the rest of the free/open source ecosystem.
Remember this, that device is great but inside a faraday cage in order to use it after an EMP bomb, this will save many people must you must keep it protected and only use it after an EMP attack
Around Los Gatos in California I see nodes that look like they are in dog collars. Lost dogs around here can get eaten by Mountain Lions, so a constant ping of your dog's location seems like a useful thing. I'm hoping there will be more prepackaged products for meshtastic such as trackers to find friends, pets, .. Also why don't phones just come with LoRa built in? If I'm out in the mountains with no cell coverage, then being able to text would be awesome. A nice non-meshtastic LoRa device/toy is the circuit mess chatter that Amazon were getting rid of for $25 for 2, but now prices seemed to have gone up.
This sounds a lot like gotenna. I wonder what the big differences are besides the customization options. Definitely seems like it would be more flexible. This is all over my head though. I can set it up, but I couldn’t tell you if I had it optimized right.
Hello there! Just watched your video on Meshtastic on Pi yesterday :) And yes, I think having it around for hiking, camping, travel, rural stuff is probably the best practical use case for now.
Wonder if there is a way to solely connect your cellphone to the node and use the node to bounce off the cell tower. I would like to configure the node to do whatever I want in the middle.
I saw this a couple of months ago and find them interesting, but I can't think of the use case. Please do some follow-ups on this technology. I'm very curious.
I was just talking to a fellow radio engineer who likes to camp, hike, etc. for him the ability to text each other while some are on the trails and some canoeing would be great. I see a portable router type setup with batteries and a solar panel mounted at a high point in his future. And some small units with usb battery packs for backpacks and canoes!
Yes! It has a setting for that-allows higher transmit power, disables encryption, and requires you to enter your callsign. It will broadcast the callsign every 10 minutes I think.
@@GeerlingEngineering Awesome! I have heard this tech mentioned, but haven't looked into it yet. Thanks for the quick intro, I look forward to your impressions and experiences with it.
I upgraded my caption tool this week, and it seems to be spitting out larger blocks instead of shorter snips, it is a bit hard to get it to work right. I may downgrade again so the timestamps are better.
I may be missing something, but could this be used for SCADA applications. For instance, water level in a creek: the sensors are tied to a microcontroller, in my case a Raspberry Pi PICO and would transmit a handshake signal every ten minutes and 30sec updates when the level is above some point. That would be monitored by a base unit several tens or hundreds of feet away. Is this a good use of LoRa technology?
This is indeed one of the useful applications! LoRaWAN is often used to build long range sensor communication networks (and Meshtastic builds on the various cheap LoRa radio devices since it doesn't need the WAN part of the network!)
It’s fine in theory but has ground to a halt in the U.K. due to congestion in populated areas and lack of interest in sparsely populated areas with geographical challenges
I get between 10-12 hours with little activity on the 'H1' with the antenna. The R1 gets maybe 14-20 hours, only gone through a couple weeks testing though.
I'm hoping to convince a few friends to drop a node somewhere plugged in at their house or desk at work. Even if they don't use it much, it would be neat to get coverage to increase a bit!
You can use them without the app too, though it is a little more annoying for the initial setup. I'm also going to set up an independent node soon so we don't have to use an app or phone at all!
The only downside to it all is that. If the internet is down and your can't get to the internet on your phone. You can not download this app. It kind of makes theses devices useless in a way. Don't get me wrong I'm using them and they are great but there is that problem is when.
I'm using the one I have at my office just through its web UI. you can also use them via serial with a Python CLI, or even build a device with integrated keyboard and screen, so it's fully independent. The app is simply a convenience if you want to use it with your mobile phone.
@@GeerlingEngineering The crazy thing is the version of mesh I have doesn't have a web interface at all. It's a old first version. I had to find a mobile app to make it work. Not even sure what version it is because the fron oled screen nothing shows up on it.
A few quick notes: yes, we did go back to 'Long Fast' instead of 'Very Long Slow', as most of the nodes in the wild seem to stick to the default. I also wrote up more thoughts and a guide for others wanting to get into Meshtastic on my blog: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/getting-started-meshtastic
As a router guy, you'll appreciate the England crowd has switched to Medium Fast, and big events with lots of nodes became unusable, but that's the routing/mesh, not the tech. More router geeks needed to figure out scaling issues.
The blog post is quite helpful, thank you. Looks like an interesting little rabbit hole to explore - luckily it does not appear to be too expensive to at least dabble with a few of the basic devices.
Where can I get those thin kind of antennas?
I just wanted to say that at 8:56 you used a blur effect which apparently according to a clip from piratesoftware that can be undone and its better to use black bars instead. I just wanted to give you a heads up and might be something you might like to look into.
@@SethCohn23 I was just reading the release notes on meshtastic 2.4.0 and it looks like there is already work going on to improve high-density performance
I dunno if this sounds silly, but I appreciate the quiet conversation, talking about a product. No music or loud talking about whatever. I can just pop this on while I empty this dishwasher and it’s calm.
Never worry about sounding silly. You are right
Totally agree
I had the same thought 👍 Really enjoyed both content and delivery…
Agreed! TH-cam has become so over stimulating lately. All of my favorite TH-camrs and talking faster and faster, and it’s becoming hard to listen to.
Over in Vancouver BC we have over 250 nodes now with all the islands connected!
Bunch of crazy Canucks. 😉
That’s cool!!
Got any resources one can look at related to these Vancouver networks? Am also local, ordered one today.
Would this scale to service 100K-1M people in an area, or is it for a lot fewer?
@@SpaceJazz3K You would have to set up the clients to be mute and run it like a traditional cell network only having routers doing the repeating but, that kind of goes against the spirit. The problem is that Meshtastic uses flood messaging so many people in a small area would just clog up the bandwidth by every node repeating. There are however other ways to use LoRa that isn't Meshtastic, reticulum for example is a network stack that works over anything and handles routing pretty well but, you'd have to build an actual network if you wanted it to work well enough off of the internet.
2 things are amazing:
- the idea with these little devices, also they look great
- a new video with jeff and his dad
My broken brain saw the purple unit and thought “that’s a big vape” 😅
Ha! I've seen that mentioned elsewhere, that case design definitely has the same proportions.
That's the least of what you get for vaping.
I suppose it could be concealed as one... if you have some odd reason to conceal it, maybe you find it easier explaining how you like making funny clouds than what meshtastic is?
No, I'm just happy to see you:P
I've never used or touched a vape in my life and i still saw that. 😂
Meshtastic currently uses "flood" routing, which (simplified) means every node on a "channel" gets every message and forwards that message to other nodes. This is easy to implement and conceptualize but has inherent limits to mesh size. There are other more sophisticated mesh routing topologies which can grow mesh networks much larger, but are of course more complex and take more state memory on nodes (which on some meshtastic devices is in short supply).
I'm hoping things can evolve over time and meshes can grow a bit while still keeping the hardware accessibly-priced.
So this is kinda like how Ethernet hubs are dumb but work on the small scale, and we needed to switch to switches in order to not clog the network
@@InternetUser999 Similar, yes. But worse, because instead of just the hub repeating, every node on the network repeats, just in case somebody didn't hear it.
@@Sylvan_dBSo, useful if you really want to make sure everyone gets the message, but extremely redundant
@@InternetUser999 Exactly. That redundancy uses a lot of bandwidth (very limited resource for LORA) and that becomes a major limiting factor to mesh size. Perhaps they'll implement the concept of master nodes (like a hub) or some other "smarter, still reliable but less bandwidth" routing.
Please keep doing more on this subject. Digital communication using ham bands would definitely be a reason I would get a license, but the bandwidth and range always seemed too low to make it useful. Would love to see some actual data.
Ham radio packet satellites, store and forward topology gives you world wide messaging... ISS has a node I do believe... And ham radio has a slew of digital modes from simple keyboard to keyboard(PSK31, RTTY) to extreme weak signal pass very little info modes(FT8/FT4). WSJT is a weak signal program with several modes(FT8 is one) that I use to bounce signals off the moon!
And the FCC recently changed the rules on digital, instead of fixed baud rates it is now fit in a 3khz bandwidth so I expect more new digital modes to come!
Winlink is a cool technology too for sending emails over only RF. Works on HF for worldwide use and VHF for local. But it’s predominantly email ( non-commercial since it’s using ham bands).
I really need to get my ham license. For a long time I had the excuse that it was difficult to get to an examiner on public transit. I've had a car for 8 years now... 🙃
I was going to request my granddad's call sign but I suppose now I'll be requesting my dad's
You can transmit full HD video if you wanted to using ham radio. Folk do it as part of ARTV setups, range well that depends on a lot of factors.
Bandwidth is dependent on frequency. Higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth, which naturally means the higher the frequency the more you need line of sight (or tropospheric ducting), but thankfully... there is a solution.
As we have things like QO-100 which is a geostationary satellite capable of repeating amateur radio TV broadcasts across a large part of EMEA.
Ham radio is a crazy big hobby with lots of fields and options.
Planning on doing that and install repeaters on top of the hotels i work, would cover pretty much the entire city.
Very well done sir! Very very well done.
just wholesome content: a father and son and some new radios
Jeff, just a gentle reminder that many people including myself really appreciate the subtitles you put in your videos. This is really interesting tech though!
It's fun to see a youngster and his son presenting together.
Put my node up on the roof a few weeks ago and built up a T-Deck. Tucson has a thriving Meshtastic community with lots of nodes and several high profile nodes that give excellent coverage.
Greetings from Phoenix, I've probably seen your node!
@@noliver7913 There is a path to Phoenix but seems to be mostly east side nodes. I've yet to be able to get a traceroute through. My roof node is MBKR.
Back in 2008 or so, my friend and I pondered how well a local neighborhood mesh network could work based on equipping (implanting, even) nodes on neighborhood cats, using kinetic power recovery. Low bandwidth, obviously, but could be useful for signalling and/or location. My memory's hazy though... considering the idea, I think you can guess why.
Meowtastic
For most people, the range is going to be a couple miles "at most" unless you have the antenna placed up very high to give another node line-of-sight to it in my experience (been running a couple nodes since April).
In the Hampton Roads region (Virginia), I did get a connection to a boater's node in the Chesapeake Bay 13 Miles away from my node (LOS, no hops), but it's not the norm for these ranges (and I haven't seen that node in a few months now). Most nodes that connect my node is about 1/2 mile away before I loose connection.
For my base node, I am using the Heltec V3 and the Rokland 8.5 dBi Omni Outdoor Helium 915 MHz Antenna (40 in) mounted in my attic space (would mount on roof but got solar panels in the way so its the 2nd best place I can put it).
I'm not sure what's going on, but you're getting TERRIBLE range compared to 90% of Meshtastic users....
@@edwardfletcher7790 90%???
Sir, you don't know what's going on because you don't even know what you're talking about...
The "majority" of meshtastic users report similar or less range on average than what i reported.. Most dont bother getting a good antenna and/or place it in a good location for their nodes. This comes from multiple meshtastic communities that I've watched.
Its the minority that gets better range than my own. Ones that will take the time and effort to get the best ranges for their setup. Certainly not the 90% that you claim...
On top of that, i said MOST nodes, Not ALL nodes connect to my node at a 1/2 mile range. I do get the occasional direct node connection 2 to 3 miles away which is great range for my setup and area. (Antenna in attic space and live in a flat, coastal, urban area).
It just the vast majority of direct, LoS connections to my node are about 1/2 mile range. Probably from the actual majority of meshtastic users that are using a crappy stock antenna with poor placement.
@@warmon6 You're must be in an environment with lots of tall buildings or something,.
The experience of people using these in a normal suburban setting is much better..
@@edwardfletcher7790 sir... When you've already been caught lying and not knowing what you're talking about...
Anything you say beyond that point can't be believed.
Everything I've claimed has been proven by others in various meshtastic communities. Discourse, reddit, and even youtube.
I dont know what you're trying to compare it to but I'm sure it's not a realistic comparison.
Love playing with Meshtastic. Glad to see a video on your channel about it. Thanks for helping get the word out about this
Here in the Kansas City metro we have over 70 nodes just in the southern part of the metro alone.
I'm thinking of throwing up a dedicated client node hooked up to a TC2-BBS docker container on one of my servers.
I’m so glad to see you do this Jeff. I’ve only just recently learned about Meshtastic and I’ve been curious to know more but didn’t know where to start.
Came to comment but it matches your pinned comment: definitely stick with longfast as the default as most people don't change off it.
We had 150+ Meshtastic devices all communicating at Hamvention. It was kinda a mess. LOL. I'll put mime up in STL city and see if I can mesh with others in STL.
Would be great to see if we can reach you either at the studio near Hampton/Watson, or my studio in Shrewsbury!
@@JeffGeerling I live in South City beside Ted Drews so I think there is a really good chance!!!
@@AA0Z Ah, I think the biggest issue is there's a small hill between me and you along the train tracks that go over Watson. I need to get a little height!
I'm in the St. Charles area so we probably won't connect directly but I'm going to order one tonight! Talk to you on the mesh!
We need to get a few folks in Bridgeton, Clayton, etc; some more inner ring suburbs!
I'm in north St. Charles, and have been running a few nodes for over 2 months, but they don't show up on either map.
@@GeerlingEngineering My shop is in Olivette - I can order one if it helps!
@@DanSaettele Would be fun to plug one in and see if you can find any other nodes. My Dad's been driving around to tower sites and has made contact with about 10 nodes now.
@@JimDumser that’s good to know there are more out there than show up on the map!
People in UK (so 10% duty cycle max as required by law causing oversaturation problems) are troubling with meshtastic reliability. Messages get lost, you don't get info on why and so on. People tried to use it at some convention (I think it was in USA) - it failed miserably due too much nodes in one place. Here my meshtastic devices haven't seen single other meshtatsic user so far (there are some > 10km away but that's not in reach due to woods/hills). Fun project, fun to play with it but we have to wait for a lot more development for more serious uses.
Definitely - seems like there needs to be more saturation overall, and less use in densely-packed environments (and/or some routing updates in firmware to make it so more nodes can mesh without stampeding).
You should set it to Long Fast!
Also well tuned antennas are very important. Alfa 915’s are the best our group have found so far.
Yay Jeff is on the mesh! I’ll have to send you some of my cases when I’m back from my hols!
So glad you guys are talking about Meshtastic ❤
I was wondering when you were going to get to this tech. A lot of the boards can be attached easily to a pi zero for example, which offers endless possibilities for remote communication or remote control.
Thanks Jeff. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get some of these. With the recent Hurricane here in the Houston area, these would have come in handy for local comms when the cells started going down with the winds first the. The downed power lines later.
Thanks, Jeff! This looks like fun! I just turned 68 and was struggling to think of something I wanted for my birthday. Just ordered two devices to play with. That should keep me out of the bingo parlor for a bit! :)
Ha! Now you could play bingo with someone a mile or two away!
@@GeerlingEngineering LOL! I live in Las Vegas too! I wonder... would a casino install a node for us? Nah, that's crazy talk. I did mess about with Mesh on the ham bands and had great luck testing out in Red Rock Canyon. I went to the overlook which is around mile 7 or so of the Scenic Drive at 5,000 feet. My buddy went to the parking area near the exit of the Scenic Drive just off the main road. We were able to transmit video successfully, and there's an app called MeshChat that seems pretty useful. I also have a Pi with PBX software and some adapters that turn analog phones into digital phones and we made VOIP calls over the mesh successfully as well. The problem is that we need mountaintop nodes for a backbone and they're hard to come by. We do have an active mesh group here which I plan to rejoin. I had to take a hiatus when my wife had a stroke 3 years ago. She's now doing much better and I can start gettng back into this kind of stuff. Check out Orange County CA's mesh page and the stuff they've done with instrumenting parades. Looks like their website is getting a makeover at sites.google.com/view/ocmesh/home
Hey, great to see this here! mesh networking is super cool and can be extremely useful.
I made an 802.11 mesh network over the amateur radio S-Band a few years ago. You can use off the shelf WRT-54g routers to do it. Pretty great fun when paired with ultra-high gain directional antennas. I was getting several kilometers without much effort. 73 de WU2F
Nice video! We have a pretty big network in the UK now!
Thanks for the video, you guys make a great team. =) I just ordered 2 today.
We have acreage and got 2 meshtastic nodes so far. I plan on getting 3 more with standalone keyboards for our kids and want to set up some repeaters for expanded coverage.
This is awesome! Would love to see a follow-up with range testing!
Looking forward to future videos on this subject
so great to see that you are covering this
meshtastic is really interesting and i had been for around one or two weeks thinking on buying a LoRA antenna to connect to my RPI Zero that i already have, or maybe buy just one of those kits with a board, a LoRA module, an antenna and having built in also the wifi and bluetooth modules (like a esp32)
I think this is an excellent option for disaster prone areas(hurricanes, tornados, earth quakes) but it's so young that getting the coverage is a challenge. Right now there are ~123 nodes in Florida as a whole. I'm not sure that's enough coverage if a disaster hits.
I l live in FL and agree there is essentially no coverage here. I'm a pilot and bring the device to my overnights around the country just to sample how many nodes exist in various cities. Knoxville TN surprised me at the number of nodes reachable via LoRA. II was receiving messages stretching up and down the mountains from Knoxville to Chattanooga. I messaged some folks there and they said that hams have been instrumental at expanding the relay nodes on their towers. In other words, without the help of routers / repeaters with antennas up high, these devices will have very limited line-of-sight range, particularly in the 900Mhz band.
FINALLY!
The video I've been waiting for. Did you know Meshtastic works with the raspberry pi?
Great for SAR, keeping a track of where everyone is in poor comms areas. Especially when used with ATAK/TAK
I may be in the metro east. I have been planning on building a node system between my near family. Look for mine to pop up, I want to reach St.Charles.
You are venturing into @AndreasSpiess territory with this one. He is quite a fan of LoRa and mesh networking and of course all his other electronics projects. As he is in Switzerland that is perhaps a little to far to connect your LoRa devices.
Ha! Unless we can do a moon bounce, or I can pop some satellites up, I don't think we'll make direct contact with Andreas. Love watching his experiments with radio!
Range is by line of sight. So if you can't cover one end of town to the other end...try driving out of town to a hill/mountain and you'll be shocked to know it will still work with stock antenna's.
So basically just like phone towers it's location....location...location all you need is one high node to help everyone else down on the ground.
The guys over in the UK have found that when you get a great number of nodes, things start to fail. Also that you can't message outside of the nodes that you can see, at least how they have things setup. MQTT can really clog your mesh with messages.
I was thinking about putting a node or repeater at my house, we are pretty high on a hill and would be able to have good reach if I built it for outside use (probably solar with battery).
There’s quite a big community for this in the UK, unfortunately it seems the more nodes you have the less chance there is of a message being delivered…there doesn’t appear to be any verification for successful delivery.
I've been looking into this for a bit thanks for the video.
More Meshtastic vids please! Great video, thanks.
I was checking their FAQ and there is a section about ham radio license. If your dad has one, it might be worth checking out that section.
Just getting started with Meshtastic myself. Our plan is to equip them with environment sensors and use them primarily for remote temperature, voltage/ current (solar battery status), etc. I’m in St. Charles and don’t see any other nodes unless I raise one up pretty high in the air. I’ll watch for your nodes. - N0SO
Really enjoy the videos with your dad 🙂
Somehow the dad/son relationship gives such a vibe. like the synergy between them.
Mesh networks require either mountains or sky scrapers with access to roofs. Line of sight with power usually isn't possible in most geographies without spending lots of money (ie, cell towers). They're kind of a niche technology.
Depending on the device, a few watts of solar and a couple of vape batteries is all the power you need for these things. Look for the RAK Wisblock boards if you want super low power. The Heltec v3 stuff works, but it needs more juice.
Though yes it is somewhat niche. You won't be sharing videos, but it's good for short messages and telemetry data.
i can think of about 5 nodes that are zip-tied to the tree tops
I wonder if I could use that to put sensors in the chicken coop way outside and have it talk to my network downstairs...? Very interesting.
Dumb home assistant thoughts aside, this seems like a really neat device to just have chill around and about and observe what happens and what messages come in. Super neat!
A few people use it for that kind of purpose - you can run your own MQTT server and have data route through that. LoRaWAN also has a lot of integrations for that too (outside of Meshtastic, which is just using the LoRa part).
this seems like something that would be a neat project for students to work on. you got a lot of nerds so setting up a city ought to be easy enough and with more effort, maybe even close by areas if not other cities!
I have been keen on really testing some of the different boards for use in a MANET configuration. I know that there is a decent sized community around the ATAK integration.
I wonder if it uses something like the WSJT modes to obtain that sort of range carrying some sort of digital signal.
This is a great project and I found some guys who started in my area. So will be investing in it, as it is an interesting off grid comms tool.
A flea market my brother and I frequent has virtually no service. I’d love to be able to split up and still send each other pictures and messages. Even better: Tether Internet service if one or the other happens to have Internet service so we can look up prices. I bet we could even convince one of the vendors who has service to hold onto a node.
The point of the pictures would be to collaborate on what we find.
Interesting to have one that can send a message on its own.
looks handy i keep this video in mind when the next update drops to send more than text like files
Ya I have seen the purple on in other videos and I love how it looks like a little phone I would love to get one to test and show off in a video
please make a longer video on the main channel on how to set these up
what board do you have
It seems to be a very interesting device. We are waiting for the next video which will hopefully show more how it works.
I’m in downtown STL, and am interested in working with you on this!
I live downtown and am interested in setting up a Meshtastic node. I live at Tucker and Washington and could talk with our condo board about having a node on our roof. It’s 10 stories up and if on the roof could provide line of site to parts of north city
Ooh, that'd be nice! I haven't seen _anything_ north of Market. A node here or there in south city but that's it. It'd be great to get a little coverage up high downtown, I could maybe hit it at CITYPARK for a St. Louis City SC match!
When all else fails: Amateur Radio. In the days following 9/11, we kept communication flowing in lower Manhattan when/where cellphones didn't work reliably. Gave the repeater on the Chrysler building a workout!
This looks pretty neat, might have to check it out... But I question their claims of 158 mile record - I can't see how something on 915Mhz, at such a low power, could travel that far between two single nodes. I wonder if these nodes could make it 30 miles in the St Louis urban jungle? There's a node not too far from me in the LSL area.
Looks like we are re-inventing local Packet radio, it was extremely popular 30 years ago on both VHF and HF, but really started falling off the last 10 years or so.
If this device is developed well (longer range, thousand miles), we're ready for the Carrington event.
I could imagine this being useful for sending messages between the house and sleepout, as mobile is unreliable in the valley I live in, despite only being ~5km from town, hah.
Dayton Hamvention found out that large numbers of nodes crash the system!
Heh I can bet ham conventions are a bit too saturated for the current mesh protocol!
Meshtastic is cool. It was however broken at Hamvemtion this year. TOO many nodes in one spot. Couldn’t get messages out due to node announcement, handshake.
I’ll definately be checking into how best to coordinate. As someone who grew version 1 Ethernet using hubs (before switches were available) the network would really slow to a crawl if too many machines talked a lot of data at the same time. Some evolution will likely be required here, maybe a slightly more expensive device because of the memory it may need.
>open source
>uses proprietary LoRa protocol
hmmm
The software is open source, but it runs on top of LoRa radio chips, which are getting very cheap, but Semtech does 'own' the LoRa protocol and licenses it out to third parties.
To be honest, though, neither of us are experts on how the protocol works, we'd defer to others to talk more on how well Semtech, the Meshtastic community, etc. play with the rest of the free/open source ecosystem.
@@GeerlingEngineering there's full SDR implementations of the patented stuff around, idk how that works legally.
It’s kinda the same as running Linux on an ARM PC with proprietary ISA.
Remember this, that device is great but inside a faraday cage in order to use it after an EMP bomb, this will save many people must you must keep it protected and only use it after an EMP attack
Around Los Gatos in California I see nodes that look like they are in dog collars. Lost dogs around here can get eaten by Mountain Lions, so a constant ping of your dog's location seems like a useful thing. I'm hoping there will be more prepackaged products for meshtastic such as trackers to find friends, pets, .. Also why don't phones just come with LoRa built in? If I'm out in the mountains with no cell coverage, then being able to text would be awesome. A nice non-meshtastic LoRa device/toy is the circuit mess chatter that Amazon were getting rid of for $25 for 2, but now prices seemed to have gone up.
This sounds a lot like gotenna. I wonder what the big differences are besides the customization options. Definitely seems like it would be more flexible. This is all over my head though. I can set it up, but I couldn’t tell you if I had it optimized right.
Would this be good for hikers? Been watching hiking channels as a way to help track them.
It was originally intended for exactly that sort of use case.
Hello there! Just watched your video on Meshtastic on Pi yesterday :)
And yes, I think having it around for hiking, camping, travel, rural stuff is probably the best practical use case for now.
@@JPBennett Just subbed to your channel. Cheers.
Great that you also found it 😁
Could you hook it up to the proper infrastructure for amplification and then a radio tower?
Wonder if there is a way to solely connect your cellphone to the node and use the node to bounce off the cell tower. I would like to configure the node to do whatever I want in the middle.
generally I've found once you're moving the range is like 80m, it's a bit useless
Okay hear this. I'm searching for a cheap mesh intercom with a jack port so I can connect my own headphones.
Any idea what I could use?
I wonder if there is a way to repurpose those Lora based helium miners that are no longer profitable to extend the network?
Jeff thanks I have reading and watching a few TH-cam videos about this. You made grab my wallet…😂!
73! Have a great day!
3:43 can someone explain the trouble? xd
I saw this a couple of months ago and find them interesting, but I can't think of the use case. Please do some follow-ups on this technology. I'm very curious.
I was just talking to a fellow radio engineer who likes to camp, hike, etc. for him the ability to text each other while some are on the trails and some canoeing would be great. I see a portable router type setup with batteries and a solar panel mounted at a high point in his future. And some small units with usb battery packs for backpacks and canoes!
More meshtastic please! 👋👍
I would like to learn how to do this what to buy. Do a video for absolute beginner.
Does a person need two or can i just by one for it to work ?
For use with HAM - can you disable the encryption and program in your call sign?
Yes! It has a setting for that-allows higher transmit power, disables encryption, and requires you to enter your callsign. It will broadcast the callsign every 10 minutes I think.
@@GeerlingEngineering Awesome! I have heard this tech mentioned, but haven't looked into it yet. Thanks for the quick intro, I look forward to your impressions and experiences with it.
Seems fun to play with, but I don't think this is very practical except in some very limited use situations.
Did you try a new captioning system? I noticed I’m just getting blocks of text.
Or is Google experimenting? 🤔
I upgraded my caption tool this week, and it seems to be spitting out larger blocks instead of shorter snips, it is a bit hard to get it to work right. I may downgrade again so the timestamps are better.
I may be missing something, but could this be used for SCADA applications. For instance, water level in a creek: the sensors are tied to a microcontroller, in my case a Raspberry Pi PICO and would transmit a handshake signal every ten minutes and 30sec updates when the level is above some point. That would be monitored by a base unit several tens or hundreds of feet away. Is this a good use of LoRa technology?
This is indeed one of the useful applications! LoRaWAN is often used to build long range sensor communication networks (and Meshtastic builds on the various cheap LoRa radio devices since it doesn't need the WAN part of the network!)
Jeff, Seem like your Dad has access to some pretty tall towers.
Heh, only problem is he's not the tower owner!
Maybe Geerling Engineering 2025 goal: buy the Supertower!
I wish there was more activity here in the Twin Cities
You'd think there would be a good amount of nodes up there!
It’s fine in theory but has ground to a halt in the U.K. due to congestion in populated areas and lack of interest in sparsely populated areas with geographical challenges
How long does the battery last on the those long antenna nodes?
I get between 10-12 hours with little activity on the 'H1' with the antenna. The R1 gets maybe 14-20 hours, only gone through a couple weeks testing though.
I'm the only node in my city so far :(
I'm hoping to convince a few friends to drop a node somewhere plugged in at their house or desk at work. Even if they don't use it much, it would be neat to get coverage to increase a bit!
How do you get to the app store to use these when the apocalypse comes?
You can use them without the app too, though it is a little more annoying for the initial setup. I'm also going to set up an independent node soon so we don't have to use an app or phone at all!
That is really cool! I must have one......
If they were a little cheaper I would consider getting one and seeing if I could say hi to you :)
If you're willing to wait, a Heltec V3 can be bought off AliExpress for about $20. It's the same base hardware inside the H3 we used.
@@GeerlingEngineering Not only willing, but have no choice :) Ordered. Thanks for the info.
we have pretty much killed meshtastic here in the UK with too many nodes.
The only downside to it all is that. If the internet is down and your can't get to the internet on your phone. You can not download this app. It kind of makes theses devices useless in a way. Don't get me wrong I'm using them and they are great but there is that problem is when.
I'm using the one I have at my office just through its web UI. you can also use them via serial with a Python CLI, or even build a device with integrated keyboard and screen, so it's fully independent. The app is simply a convenience if you want to use it with your mobile phone.
@@GeerlingEngineering The crazy thing is the version of mesh I have doesn't have a web interface at all. It's a old first version. I had to find a mobile app to make it work. Not even sure what version it is because the fron oled screen nothing shows up on it.