Nothing like sensationalism to get the ratings up, eh? Meshtastic isn't broken, just in a few big cities bad practice is causing problems due to traffic volume . What's described here is what LoRa has been used for since it began nearly ten years ago.
Here in Kentucky we are doing pretty well with our mesh we dont use the main root topic on US and are using a regional state and city root topic and its been running perfectly with no crashing.
But that’s MQTT, what’s the point in using internet based comms on a system designed for radio? Just text or use an app. Many of us are trying to use it as actual radio, for SHTF etc.
@@TerraMagnus SHTF isn’t about the world ending. Not even close. My town flooded a few years ago, total lack of power and communication. Prepare the every situation. You’re just ignorant.
@@TerraMagnusRight? And your little Meshtastic devices aren't going to be of much use in a "SHTF" power fantasy, if the electric grid is wasted your Heltec board is pretty much useless. Meshtastic is awesome but for somebody role playing as Mad Max it's kinda...silly
I think the reputation of Meshtastic got ahead of itself. In small scale tests it was borderline magic but it turned out to have scaling issues when usage exploded. Devs are working through it and just a few days ago it had to disable the ROUTER_CLIENT role because it turned out people were (probably unknowingly) misusing it. Those nodes were prioritized in routing because they were supposed to be at geographical advantages for range, but people were just mounting them on poles and such. Those nodes had better coverage than random mobile nodes but far from what the intended use demanded. Basically we're early adopters. I've been a Meshtastic user since the 1.x series builds and it has come a long way, but it's not ready for mainstream adoption just yet. Keep an eye out for routing changes in the changelog, now that there's momentum in solving scaling issues we need to test the scaling as quickly as possible!
We've had a great deal of success with meshtastic, in the UK running 120 nodes at a recent hackers/makers festival and seeing around 30ish at glastonbury festival, I didn't have a single lost message and we were reaching from mid-Dorset all the way to Burnham-on-Sea on default/legal power settings (albeit to elevated locations). Phone networks at both events were sub optimal so it was genuinely useful, but I saw less external interference on 868Mhz in these countryside locations compared to built up areas so this may be a factor that negatively affects meshtastic. Exciting times and I hope either future meshtastic firmware or a new Lrms style approach will make things even more robust. As an engineer I still regard the chirp system as absolute magic and its performance continually astounds me.
Were you on long fast default at glastonbury? I topped out at 13 nodes on site this year. I wouldnt be surprised if you were hopping via my node, theres one on the hill line of site between festival ground and the coast with a good path over to weston bridgewater and sometimes across into wales
I can't help thinking that it's not meshtastic that's broken, it's the config settings of the people in Manchester. Long/Fast may not be the best choice, probably not all the static nodes need to be on full power, and if there's anyone junking out MQTT traffic then they need to curb it, even if everyone has Ignore MQTT switched on. I would be interested to see how congested 868 MHz is on a waterfall. Popularity has its own downfalls lol. 😂
In my opinion one mistake was calling it “Long Fast” in the first place - in a hobby populated by mostly blokes, who wouldn’t want long and also fast, who would want less than long, who would want less than fast, everyone is going to feel short-changed and inferior if they were to admit they’re on medium-slow or short slow or something unimpressive like that - that’s what people are like
If you adopt meshtastic to try and make friends and make contact, then go back to ham radio. I'm adopting meshtastic to have a backup off grid communication in case SHTF situation.
I don't see it being that black and white. There'll always be people who'll experiment with a system to see what it can do and ham radio isn't always the answer. Nothing wrong with trying to build friendships / contacts with an open access system like this rather than be tied / restrict as you are with ham radio.
How is a system consisting of blind repeaters gonna scale? Two of those in range of each other will repeat at the same time and create a collision. Meshtastic at least does listen-before-talk and collision avoidance by implementing random delays based on SNR and channel utilization. Yes, that might not scale up to hundreds of nodes, but with proper settings (e.g. use more CLIENT_MUTE and less ROUTER nodes as you've advocated for) you can get quite far. In the end LoRa has limited bandwidth so any system built on top of it has limits.
Firstly I think you'd need to have addressable repeaters, rather than doing what I did in my video where I used a simple RPT flag you could dial up a certain repeater with an ID, a bit like CTCSS on oldskool FM HAM repeaters. I agree on the CLIENT_MUTE usage for meshtastic in very congested areas and I've been saying this a long time, I do intend to make a video about this. As I said in the video I'm not saying this is trying to tread on meshtastics toes, it never could but it can offer another dimension to the hobby and help people learn about how a system like this works rather than just turning it on and expecting it to be a whatsapp replacement!
@@andykirby I appreciate the nuance. It's just very difficult to balance between reliability and scalability using mobile nodes with limited bandwidth and memory. "Smart" routing algorithms will create overhead, with "dumb" routing manual configuration is required if you want to push the limits.
It will level out like any hobby/fad/trend…… just have one full time base and 1 portable. I have loads of nodes but only keep two active full time…… lora isn’t going away IoT is used on mass
@@HotelHero (to be clear I agree with what you said about meshtastic not going anywhere and the new UI is great. I'm mostly responding to what you wrote about using it as a messaging system....) Too bad the messaging part doesn't work reliably. A lot of people have very unrealistic expectations. It's fun to experiment with and learn about, and it's exciting to open a client and see that a node from a hundred miles away made it to yours via 7 hops. But good luck sending a message reliably to your neighbor one block away. Here's why: Did you know that activity on a frequency is generally throttled to 25%? Yes, all those nodes talking to themselves choke the bandwidth. Check out your nodes' and other nodes' metrics if you don't believe me. It peaks around 25%. You might be wondering who is talking because you aren't seeing anything on LongFast. Well, that's because the nodes are saying to each other, "I exist" and "here I am" so much that it can consume more than 25%, and few people can talk when it is throttled. Next, add in more nodes. Some homes become black holes for neighborhoods and cities because they have three nodes. Oopsie - there go the hops. Then you have the folks who think they are the special ones who need to setup a router in their house, which further detroys the mesh. On and on it goes.
@@HotelHerocan’t wait to see how they get the t-deck sorted out. The t-deck is capable of many thing so would be good to see this as a focal point one day ?
It would be educational to hear a summary of the Meshtastic problems you've faced and proposed solutions. Given the number of nodes out there, it seems the best strategy would be to fix Meshtastic. Probably mostly the routing and forwarding.
anyone who knows the history of Hub,Switch, and Router technology knew this was going to happen. Meshtactic has a lot in common with early token ring network and hubs and therefor has the same issues.
If people like Andy, actually explained the basics and the way laymen should set up their nodes/devices etc, then Meshtastic would work much better. We need someone who is interested in helping us
You won't even find this on the Meshtastic forum, there is documentation, but it is not clear enough and specific enough. Ask a question and you get answers like I have mine set up like this and it works great, yet when someone else does the same it does not work well. The sellers of the boards also need to be held accountable and have the latest version of firmware on their boards, this crap of people having to immediately update to get a board to work should not be, too much updating in any case with these things for normal people to remain interested in them, people want to leave the device alone and for it to just work. The first phones I had never required an update, until google and apple came along.
The uplink airtime is limited to 30 seconds per day (24 hours) per node. The downlink messages are limited to 10 messages per day (24 hours) per node. So got to be careful to stay within the legal rules.
It’s pretty simple to control the Reyax modules from an Arduino or ESP32 with a bit of simple C coding to send out and relevant AT commands via the serial port.
@andykirby is it possible you could do a video on the motorola R7 showing us the CPS and all the functions the radio is capable of, settings and useful features through the cps. there isnt many videos on the motorola R7 and the ones that are there are quite brief.
Does the repeater also function as an extra node in the network to connect to, so others can increase the range as well? I was planning to add an antenna on my roof, but there aren't many nodes in my area. Or do you advise adding a node with a high gain antenna on the roof?
Whats next? Lol, just because the poorly educated people using it in your region failed to scale it properly doesnt mean its time to give up and run away. Work with the devs and make it better for the uneducated and dont be that guy in the community that runs away from the very community he created and hides under a click baity title. Sucks to see when i heavily relied on your videos and now what your just gonna give up because of some problems LOL. That attitiude is almost sad.
Please Andy try not to misled people ...sure meshtastic might not work all the time like our mobile phones but its still early days...meshtastic is not broken...its just getting started!
So where I am in the states Meshtastic hasn't taken off, but there are a few of us sprinkled around. I'm wondering if it would work better there if you could divide up regions by channels. I know it might be easier to heard cats, but do you think that would theoretically solve the problem?
Yeah in areas where it's not busy you'll have a much better chance at successful messaging but you still need strong RSSI for it to work well. The way to make it work currently is to turn off the mesh feature on all but very well placed nodes. This avoids a lot of congestion.
@Andrew, can something like this be made to use for packet radio on 27MC? Would be awesome to being able to sent and receive messages in an emergency situation
Just a thought no one thought of message system be overload due to too many. Reason is simple it was not tested large scale. As long there good feedback and report to the people who work on will try to improve it I hope. But I guess it need more powerful mobile base to handle that traffic I think. Better hardware?
Well I get no contacts here Yeovil so diluting the pool of contacts with a 2nd protocol would be a disaster :( Great idea though. I like Tulip firmware for the Tdeck. Great video dude
I'm 14 miles north from you on high ground running an omni antenna, In the next month I'm changing it for a south facing yagi (due to higher hills to my north) so hang on in there as I think it likely I can reach Yeovil. I can already reach Weston&Burnham to my west on the coast with another antenna so lets make this thing work :-) 26CT813
I like your approach. I've done a similar project after seeing the inadequacies of meshtastic. I'll work on translating your python parameters to c in order to apply it to many devices and microcontrollers. (I'm not a python pgmr.... lol), but I have several Lora modules that are not meshtastic compatible and could use a purpose in life. Thanks.
Reality is Meshtastic is still only releasing Alpha and Beta quality software. If you're on the network then you are an early adopter. Clearly we need lots of early adopters to work out the scaling issues but jumping ship now would essentially be to judge a book by it's cover. Anyway, it's your boards so you can do whatever you want with them (as long as you follow the regulations), but if you do switch away from Meshtastic I think we'd all appreciate you coming back later for the next round of testing the mesh routing. Mesh routing changes are mentioned in the changelogs so keep an eye out for those.
Looking at the UK situation, there was a thought it could be a mass chat protocol .. I have a few nodes, static, solar and mobile and it works for me - I only need a small mesh to communicate in my village, very few people will have the funds to join the system, but if they can and expand the local mesh, that’s great! But due to distance and habitation, i doubt it will bridge to the next city. The UK has a higher density, and it’s now saturated to the point where it looks like it’s falling over due to its own success.
@@recom273 maybe folks in the uk do something different, like not managing the network right? other types of networks can be congested too and optimized to be efficient. i dont see anything exlcluding meshtastic.
Andy, based on the strong message in the first 60 seconds or so of THIS video. Would you please DELETE all your previous videos where you were urging us all to get excited as you are/were in order for us to start spending our money on it. I know I get it, channels like yours generate clicks, revenue etc and all that comes with a lot of perks for your channel from the brands manufacturing stuff. It would be crass and cynical for you to continue to earn revenue from videos that you no longer agree with your own sentiments and encouragement to the community. Why would anyone want to believe anything you say. I tip my hat to you for admitting the failure of Meshtastic. Close those videos down now and help prevent people less able to spend the money wasting it on the original hype. 73 👌 sincerely.
I don't want to give up on meshtastic, I like its APRS style tracking, I'm still going to get my solar node working on medium fast, got a T-Deck too, so that could be repurposed with different FW, so not a complete waste of money 😊
Meshtastic also has a problem when your population isn't dense enough. I've dumped about $1000 into building nodes and pocket units with the idea that about a dozen people in my group could message each other. It doesn't work. From my repeater on my roof, I can see my friends repeater and his handhelds. From my handheld, I can see his repeater, but not his handhelds. Apparently if all your handhelds can see the same repeater, it would work. But building a network of relays for dispersed nodes just doesn't work. I wish I'd known about this before dumping money into it. I'm moving onto GMRS. It's fantastically cheaper and works much better as emergency comms.
Step one, switch to a faster speed, long fast is only ideal in situations where there’s only a few people. Step two, increase the organization of the network, use mqtt to bridge and layer the network on a bunch of channels and a bunch of speeds on each channel regionally. Tons of people using the same single channel with 50bytes/s rate won’t work. Faster speeds are available, easy to use, and much faster up to 300x faster.
I think you should add an easy option to edit the ID of devices to add a name or call sign as the ID , the repeaters could then pass this information including the relevant repeaters ID
Mesh tactic was a nightmare at the Dayton Hamvention earlier this year. So this "new unit" runs with AT commands? Similar to the Hayes Smart Modem commands?
Meshes work but broken trust model in meshtastic, it needs trust roots not block chaining, no way to stop abuse it fell into the zero trust trap so its always gonna get spammed.
Sacrilege! No you are absolutely right. What we need for Meshtastic, is smarter routers that can manage a large number of clients and route intelligently. Developers currently are most focussed on the emergency comms aspect intended to work between smaller groups fighting off Zombies. that is what you need if you are an outdoors type, but inadequate for us trying to make paging fancy again.
@@ahaveland Just a heads up because there is a lot of chatter about this. They are technically on v2 and are discussing how to address a lot of the current issues in the next version (v3).
I really thing you are overreacting here. So the problem is when lots of nodes get togetger, but thats completely understandable and was probably expected by many, and its not a hard limit, its somerhing that can be fixed by an update. And as it seems that this is becoming a problem i have no doubt that the awesome peaople who make and maintain their github, for free mind you, will come out with a improved version soon enough. This almost feels like you want to kill the entire project for no apparent reason.
Who would have thought that giving everyone a megaphone would replace the telephone system! 🙂 GPRS and TCP/IP has already worked this out. Set up routing nodes with point to point microwave dishes to avoid bleed and RFI, then you can use small broadcast areas with fewer nodes. Then it might work at scale.
I think you should take along all the comments below and make a video about that instead of writing off meshtastic. Alternative is ofcourse vara hf with winlink😊
@@pen25whilst MQTT being broadcast and leaking into the mesh etc is an issue, the real issue is that too many people are running as router etc when they are in sub optimal locations. If people stuck to client and client mute it would instantly help lower packet collisions. But nobody listens, no matter which forum we try to educate people on this.
Months and months of TH-camrs pushing it like crack. And then, nah it's broken. I wonder why? It's a victim of it own success that you encouraged every man and his dog to jump on the bandwagon.
If all you want is to live a peaceful life, then never touch stupid assholes. Which in this particular case means never touch LoRa, Meshtastic and ham radio operators. All that is ready to turn your life into a freaking hell.
I gave up on Meshtastic on 868, I have been experimenting on 432, ham licence helps here. But this looks interesting. Another rabbit warren you have pushed me down Andy!
I and a small group have just piled up some boards, parts, components. Couple hundred $$US worth. Planned to deploy about 6 standalone solar nodes and see what happens. One person has thoughts of using with CERT and ARES EmComm type activities. Should I act fast before the Amazon Return Period expires?
I went and bought every thing, Heltec V3 915mHz antenna (from Seattle) Bender case And a Sony 18650 battery, Only to see no other nodes in my area with the right settings… kind of wasted $90
Nothing like sensationalism to get the ratings up, eh? Meshtastic isn't broken, just in a few big cities bad practice is causing problems due to traffic volume . What's described here is what LoRa has been used for since it began nearly ten years ago.
Here in Kentucky we are doing pretty well with our mesh we dont use the main root topic on US and are using a regional state and city root topic and its been running perfectly with no crashing.
But that’s MQTT, what’s the point in using internet based comms on a system designed for radio? Just text or use an app.
Many of us are trying to use it as actual radio, for SHTF etc.
@@matt-fh6hb”SHTF”… lol… your comms are going to fail before the world will.
@@TerraMagnus SHTF isn’t about the world ending. Not even close. My town flooded a few years ago, total lack of power and communication. Prepare the every situation. You’re just ignorant.
@@TerraMagnusRight? And your little Meshtastic devices aren't going to be of much use in a "SHTF" power fantasy, if the electric grid is wasted your Heltec board is pretty much useless. Meshtastic is awesome but for somebody role playing as Mad Max it's kinda...silly
@matthewrowles6881 guess you haven't been using solar eh
First you sing the praises and urge everyone to go out and buy the boards and cases, then months later you give up and move on. I feel scammed.
Nobody knew it'd fall apart if it became too popular though, still glad I didn't jump in too soon mind you 🤷♂
I think the reputation of Meshtastic got ahead of itself. In small scale tests it was borderline magic but it turned out to have scaling issues when usage exploded.
Devs are working through it and just a few days ago it had to disable the ROUTER_CLIENT role because it turned out people were (probably unknowingly) misusing it. Those nodes were prioritized in routing because they were supposed to be at geographical advantages for range, but people were just mounting them on poles and such. Those nodes had better coverage than random mobile nodes but far from what the intended use demanded.
Basically we're early adopters. I've been a Meshtastic user since the 1.x series builds and it has come a long way, but it's not ready for mainstream adoption just yet. Keep an eye out for routing changes in the changelog, now that there's momentum in solving scaling issues we need to test the scaling as quickly as possible!
Not really Andys fault he didn’t make it. It’s a cool project it cost me about £30 to get involved and the esp board can be used for almost anything
@@TheeMuseumofjunkpretty obvious it would fail with too much use.
For me and my family and friends, I'm sticking with LORA meshtastic. It serves a purpose, and I'm gonna keep it until I see the need to change.
We've had a great deal of success with meshtastic, in the UK running 120 nodes at a recent hackers/makers festival and seeing around 30ish at glastonbury festival, I didn't have a single lost message and we were reaching from mid-Dorset all the way to Burnham-on-Sea on default/legal power settings (albeit to elevated locations). Phone networks at both events were sub optimal so it was genuinely useful, but I saw less external interference on 868Mhz in these countryside locations compared to built up areas so this may be a factor that negatively affects meshtastic. Exciting times and I hope either future meshtastic firmware or a new Lrms style approach will make things even more robust. As an engineer I still regard the chirp system as absolute magic and its performance continually astounds me.
Were you on long fast default at glastonbury? I topped out at 13 nodes on site this year.
I wouldnt be surprised if you were hopping via my node, theres one on the hill line of site between festival ground and the coast with a good path over to weston bridgewater and sometimes across into wales
I can't help thinking that it's not meshtastic that's broken, it's the config settings of the people in Manchester. Long/Fast may not be the best choice, probably not all the static nodes need to be on full power, and if there's anyone junking out MQTT traffic then they need to curb it, even if everyone has Ignore MQTT switched on. I would be interested to see how congested 868 MHz is on a waterfall. Popularity has its own downfalls lol. 😂
In my opinion one mistake was calling it “Long Fast” in the first place - in a hobby populated by mostly blokes, who wouldn’t want long and also fast, who would want less than long, who would want less than fast, everyone is going to feel short-changed and inferior if they were to admit they’re on medium-slow or short slow or something unimpressive like that - that’s what people are like
@@IanTindale"ribbed for her pleasure" 🤭
If you adopt meshtastic to try and make friends and make contact, then go back to ham radio. I'm adopting meshtastic to have a backup off grid communication in case SHTF situation.
I don't see it being that black and white. There'll always be people who'll experiment with a system to see what it can do and ham radio isn't always the answer. Nothing wrong with trying to build friendships / contacts with an open access system like this rather than be tied / restrict as you are with ham radio.
if you adopt meshtastic for off brid backup incase of SHFT situation then go back to ham radio.
It's great for SAR when integrated with ATAK. The tracking is what it was all about, not the messaging.
There's a work in progress to implement next hop routing in the meshtastic firmware for version 3.0. Watch this space.
How long do you think people will wait? Genuine question.
How is a system consisting of blind repeaters gonna scale? Two of those in range of each other will repeat at the same time and create a collision.
Meshtastic at least does listen-before-talk and collision avoidance by implementing random delays based on SNR and channel utilization. Yes, that might not scale up to hundreds of nodes, but with proper settings (e.g. use more CLIENT_MUTE and less ROUTER nodes as you've advocated for) you can get quite far. In the end LoRa has limited bandwidth so any system built on top of it has limits.
Firstly I think you'd need to have addressable repeaters, rather than doing what I did in my video where I used a simple RPT flag you could dial up a certain repeater with an ID, a bit like CTCSS on oldskool FM HAM repeaters.
I agree on the CLIENT_MUTE usage for meshtastic in very congested areas and I've been saying this a long time, I do intend to make a video about this. As I said in the video I'm not saying this is trying to tread on meshtastics toes, it never could but it can offer another dimension to the hobby and help people learn about how a system like this works rather than just turning it on and expecting it to be a whatsapp replacement!
@@andykirby I appreciate the nuance. It's just very difficult to balance between reliability and scalability using mobile nodes with limited bandwidth and memory. "Smart" routing algorithms will create overhead, with "dumb" routing manual configuration is required if you want to push the limits.
@@andykirby fm repeaters.. scale… lol. andy, wake up
I don’t see the value over meshtastic here. If meshtastic can’t scale im your environment, then improve it. It’s open source.
Dude, I've been looking at meshtastic boards for months now, don't be telling me it's broken now lol
It will level out like any hobby/fad/trend…… just have one full time base and 1 portable. I have loads of nodes but only keep two active full time…… lora isn’t going away IoT is used on mass
Lol meshtastic isn't going anywhere and the new UI looks amazing. I think it might become the standard for non-FCC bowing messaging systems
@@HotelHero (to be clear I agree with what you said about meshtastic not going anywhere and the new UI is great. I'm mostly responding to what you wrote about using it as a messaging system....)
Too bad the messaging part doesn't work reliably. A lot of people have very unrealistic expectations. It's fun to experiment with and learn about, and it's exciting to open a client and see that a node from a hundred miles away made it to yours via 7 hops.
But good luck sending a message reliably to your neighbor one block away. Here's why:
Did you know that activity on a frequency is generally throttled to 25%? Yes, all those nodes talking to themselves choke the bandwidth.
Check out your nodes' and other nodes' metrics if you don't believe me. It peaks around 25%. You might be wondering who is talking because you aren't seeing anything on LongFast. Well, that's because the nodes are saying to each other, "I exist" and "here I am" so much that it can consume more than 25%, and few people can talk when it is throttled.
Next, add in more nodes. Some homes become black holes for neighborhoods and cities because they have three nodes. Oopsie - there go the hops.
Then you have the folks who think they are the special ones who need to setup a router in their house, which further detroys the mesh.
On and on it goes.
It's not broken it's just UK has so many nodes and many are configured wrong so they make the mesh not work great
@@HotelHerocan’t wait to see how they get the t-deck sorted out. The t-deck is capable of many thing so would be good to see this as a focal point one day ?
Reticulum is far better for this purpose of hundreds of nodes and should be useable on hardware intended for Meshtastic
It would be educational to hear a summary of the Meshtastic problems you've faced and proposed solutions. Given the number of nodes out there, it seems the best strategy would be to fix Meshtastic. Probably mostly the routing and forwarding.
I have a video planned for this.
@@andykirby You have my attention.
anyone who knows the history of Hub,Switch, and Router technology knew this was going to happen. Meshtactic has a lot in common with early token ring network and hubs and therefor has the same issues.
Yep no authentication because meshtastic has the zero trust brain worms
It's only broken if you use the default settings.
Why wouldn't you just use the Lora and create a custom interface/functionality? Why does it have to exclude meshtastic?
@@HotelHero because it’s an uk thing. meshexit
If people like Andy, actually explained the basics and the way laymen should set up their nodes/devices etc, then Meshtastic would work much better. We need someone who is interested in helping us
You won't even find this on the Meshtastic forum, there is documentation, but it is not clear enough and specific enough. Ask a question and you get answers like I have mine set up like this and it works great, yet when someone else does the same it does not work well. The sellers of the boards also need to be held accountable and have the latest version of firmware on their boards, this crap of people having to immediately update to get a board to work should not be, too much updating in any case with these things for normal people to remain interested in them, people want to leave the device alone and for it to just work.
The first phones I had never required an update, until google and apple came along.
The uplink airtime is limited to 30 seconds per day (24 hours) per node. The downlink messages are limited to 10 messages per day (24 hours) per node. So got to be careful to stay within the legal rules.
No one cares
It’s pretty simple to control the Reyax modules from an Arduino or ESP32 with a bit of simple C coding to send out and relevant AT commands via the serial port.
Yes it is, what would be cool is to be able to use the SPI based LoRa module on a lot of these boards to communicate with the Reyax modules.
@andykirby is it possible you could do a video on the motorola R7 showing us the CPS and all the functions the radio is capable of, settings and useful features through the cps. there isnt many videos on the motorola R7 and the ones that are there are quite brief.
Does the repeater also function as an extra node in the network to connect to, so others can increase the range as well? I was planning to add an antenna on my roof, but there aren't many nodes in my area. Or do you advise adding a node with a high gain antenna on the roof?
Whats next? Lol, just because the poorly educated people using it in your region failed to scale it properly doesnt mean its time to give up and run away. Work with the devs and make it better for the uneducated and dont be that guy in the community that runs away from the very community he created and hides under a click baity title. Sucks to see when i heavily relied on your videos and now what your just gonna give up because of some problems LOL. That attitiude is almost sad.
I didn't say I was giving up! I've been making videos about radio messaging and data comms since the beginning of this channel.
Please Andy try not to misled people ...sure meshtastic might not work all the time like our mobile phones but its still early days...meshtastic is not broken...its just getting started!
I'm only echoing what many in the community are saying. Standby fro more videos on how we can make it better.
So where I am in the states Meshtastic hasn't taken off, but there are a few of us sprinkled around. I'm wondering if it would work better there if you could divide up regions by channels. I know it might be easier to heard cats, but do you think that would theoretically solve the problem?
Yeah in areas where it's not busy you'll have a much better chance at successful messaging but you still need strong RSSI for it to work well.
The way to make it work currently is to turn off the mesh feature on all but very well placed nodes. This avoids a lot of congestion.
@@andykirbylike ham radio.
Yeah no, meshtastic is what we want not just a text CB we want private messaging.
Why not work with the Meshtastic community to address the problems that you say are problems?
I am doing this also.👍🏻
@@andykirby can you refer to a related topic on github or discourse please?
@Andrew, can something like this be made to use for packet radio on 27MC? Would be awesome to being able to sent and receive messages in an emergency situation
Just a thought no one thought of message system be overload due to too many. Reason is simple it was not tested large scale. As long there good feedback and report to the people who work on will try to improve it I hope. But I guess it need more powerful mobile base to handle that traffic I think. Better hardware?
Works great for my family on our private channels. Not getting range though.
Well I get no contacts here Yeovil so diluting the pool of contacts with a 2nd protocol would be a disaster :( Great idea though. I like Tulip firmware for the Tdeck. Great video dude
I'm 14 miles north from you on high ground running an omni antenna, In the next month I'm changing it for a south facing yagi (due to higher hills to my north) so hang on in there as I think it likely I can reach Yeovil. I can already reach Weston&Burnham to my west on the coast with another antenna so lets make this thing work :-) 26CT813
I like your approach. I've done a similar project after seeing the inadequacies of meshtastic. I'll work on translating your python parameters to c in order to apply it to many devices and microcontrollers. (I'm not a python pgmr.... lol), but I have several Lora modules that are not meshtastic compatible and could use a purpose in life. Thanks.
Yeah tell us it’s broken after you told us to buy boards and how great you thought it was. Going to try selling me a diesel car next?
A small amount of research from him would have saved everyone wasted time and money 😤
This!
Reality is Meshtastic is still only releasing Alpha and Beta quality software. If you're on the network then you are an early adopter. Clearly we need lots of early adopters to work out the scaling issues but jumping ship now would essentially be to judge a book by it's cover.
Anyway, it's your boards so you can do whatever you want with them (as long as you follow the regulations), but if you do switch away from Meshtastic I think we'd all appreciate you coming back later for the next round of testing the mesh routing. Mesh routing changes are mentioned in the changelogs so keep an eye out for those.
This Technology is Bleeding Edge, if ya can't handle that, go back to Knitting 😂🇨🇦
why is messaging not working for u Andy? it works great in our town... what is your problem with it?>
It works with a handful of nodes but in congested areas it falls over.
@@andykirbycan you give some technical detail on your claim, like demonstrate the issue? just that your video isnt considered as clickbait
Looking at the UK situation, there was a thought it could be a mass chat protocol .. I have a few nodes, static, solar and mobile and it works for me - I only need a small mesh to communicate in my village, very few people will have the funds to join the system, but if they can and expand the local mesh, that’s great! But due to distance and habitation, i doubt it will bridge to the next city. The UK has a higher density, and it’s now saturated to the point where it looks like it’s falling over due to its own success.
Exactly @@recom273
@@recom273 maybe folks in the uk do something different, like not managing the network right? other types of networks can be congested too and optimized to be efficient. i dont see anything exlcluding meshtastic.
This is a great idea. I was wanting to give something like this a try and you have already made the first steps 🙂
Good stuff, get stuck in!
I like the screen on that, any idea what the model or specs are?
One American guy has made a bbs linked - how about like old packet attached boss's to repeaters?
Andy, based on the strong message in the first 60 seconds or so of THIS video. Would you please DELETE all your previous videos where you were urging us all to get excited as you are/were in order for us to start spending our money on it.
I know I get it, channels like yours generate clicks, revenue etc and all that comes with a lot of perks for your channel from the brands manufacturing stuff.
It would be crass and cynical for you to continue to earn revenue from videos that you no longer agree with your own sentiments and encouragement to the community.
Why would anyone want to believe anything you say. I tip my hat to you for admitting the failure of Meshtastic. Close those videos down now and help prevent people less able to spend the money wasting it on the original hype.
73 👌 sincerely.
I don't want to give up on meshtastic, I like its APRS style tracking, I'm still going to get my solar node working on medium fast, got a T-Deck too, so that could be repurposed with different FW, so not a complete waste of money 😊
Hasn't routing already been solved by APRS ?
The good thing about this is it's simplicity and pretty low cost allowing access to total beginners. A great learning tool.
Meshtastic also has a problem when your population isn't dense enough. I've dumped about $1000 into building nodes and pocket units with the idea that about a dozen people in my group could message each other. It doesn't work. From my repeater on my roof, I can see my friends repeater and his handhelds. From my handheld, I can see his repeater, but not his handhelds. Apparently if all your handhelds can see the same repeater, it would work. But building a network of relays for dispersed nodes just doesn't work. I wish I'd known about this before dumping money into it. I'm moving onto GMRS. It's fantastically cheaper and works much better as emergency comms.
Step one, switch to a faster speed, long fast is only ideal in situations where there’s only a few people.
Step two, increase the organization of the network, use mqtt to bridge and layer the network on a bunch of channels and a bunch of speeds on each channel regionally.
Tons of people using the same single channel with 50bytes/s rate won’t work. Faster speeds are available, easy to use, and much faster up to 300x faster.
Seeed E5 Lora modules come with a full AT command set
Is Meshtastic not working for technical reasons or because people are not replying to messages?
Nice overview video, have you tried Meshtastic BBS/Mail ? God bless.
I think you should add an easy option to edit the ID of devices to add a name or call sign as the ID , the repeaters could then pass this information including the relevant repeaters ID
Mesh tactic was a nightmare at the Dayton Hamvention earlier this year.
So this "new unit" runs with AT commands? Similar to the Hayes Smart Modem commands?
Yes, I'm aware of the hamventiin problems.
Correct it's similar to the the Hayes command set.
Meshes work but broken trust model in meshtastic, it needs trust roots not block chaining, no way to stop abuse it fell into the zero trust trap so its always gonna get spammed.
Sacrilege! No you are absolutely right. What we need for Meshtastic, is smarter routers that can manage a large number of clients and route intelligently. Developers currently are most focussed on the emergency comms aspect intended to work between smaller groups fighting off Zombies. that is what you need if you are an outdoors type, but inadequate for us trying to make paging fancy again.
Ah well, back to my megaphone and two tin cans and a piece of string
Are you serious?
Carrier pigeons are where it’s at
It sounds like you're halfway into re-implementing APRS on LoRa
sheesh - 30 years and returning back to AT commands.
I'm not too sure if you have covered this as I'm at work and skipping through. Does it have encryption?
It has encryption by way of an 8 digit hex code.
@@andykirby that's better than nothing.
@@ifell3 That's 128 bits.
Client mute???
Yes been saying this a while.
My reply disappeared? Or you see it
So by passing on the message of meshtastic everyone hyping it up actually killed it! Ironic.
Yep! It wasn't ready for the onslaught of UK users!
@@InimitaPaul good learning though for V2...
@@ahaveland Just a heads up because there is a lot of chatter about this. They are technically on v2 and are discussing how to address a lot of the current issues in the next version (v3).
@@fibonacho thanks, I should have said Vn+1
I just started looking at Meshtastic. Glad I saw your video before I wasted cash. Cheers.
I really thing you are overreacting here. So the problem is when lots of nodes get togetger, but thats completely understandable and was probably expected by many, and its not a hard limit, its somerhing that can be fixed by an update. And as it seems that this is becoming a problem i have no doubt that the awesome peaople who make and maintain their github, for free mind you, will come out with a improved version soon enough.
This almost feels like you want to kill the entire project for no apparent reason.
I deal with millions of LoRaWAN devices in the UK. It works.. And well. If you follow best practice.
could this be used with the now obsolete lora devices?
It depends on the hardware.
@@andykirby err, what hardware listed as compatible with meshtastic can be used?
Going crazy in the USA now build an app around it.
lol. This only works because no one is using it. If you can’t see how this will immediately fail when on a wider release…. You already lost.
Harsh but true. This video seems to represent exactly the same flaws that Meshtastic does.
the frequency range is also pretty uk and ham specific. scales by exclusion 👑
Who would have thought that giving everyone a megaphone would replace the telephone system! 🙂
GPRS and TCP/IP has already worked this out.
Set up routing nodes with point to point microwave dishes to avoid bleed and RFI, then you can use small broadcast areas with fewer nodes.
Then it might work at scale.
Yep!
For sure it's been figured out before, it's all just requires a bit too much bandwidth if you are trying to do it without any sort of backhaul.
@@ahaveland if gprs and tcpip figured it all out why isnt it used by innovation andy now?
@@TouYubeTom Huh? Your mobile phone uses GPRS and TCP/IP.
The entire internet uses TCP/IP.
I think you should take along all the comments below and make a video about that instead of writing off meshtastic. Alternative is ofcourse vara hf with winlink😊
Imagine having to code on one of those 🙃
It can be a bit challenging yeah🤣 however it is quite refreshing not have notifications going off while you are trying to concentrate🤣
What meshtastic is dead 😮 just invested many hours designing a case lol
1 year down the road: Lrms is broken,so what's next? 🤣
Pretty cool, but will not ship to Europe...
how is it broken?
Err messaging doesn't work...
@@andykirby now i think you are just jealous on the success of something else.. what a bold claim
User error of everyone using default settings designed for areas that have few radios and applying it to packed areas
@@andykirby it works. It works fine. If you mean mqtt flooding the app. That's a configuration issue
@@pen25whilst MQTT being broadcast and leaking into the mesh etc is an issue, the real issue is that too many people are running as router etc when they are in sub optimal locations. If people stuck to client and client mute it would instantly help lower packet collisions. But nobody listens, no matter which forum we try to educate people on this.
Problem with Meshtastic is that is not so mesh it is relays :|
Is this going to be another broken fad that ends up costing a fortune and a lot of time but made out to be a cheap hobby?
Probably cheaper than golf 🤣
Months and months of TH-camrs pushing it like crack. And then, nah it's broken. I wonder why? It's a victim of it own success that you encouraged every man and his dog to jump on the bandwagon.
Not even broken, just don’t use the default settings designed for use in areas with few radios
If all you want is to live a peaceful life, then never touch stupid assholes. Which in this particular case means never touch LoRa, Meshtastic and ham radio operators. All that is ready to turn your life into a freaking hell.
reticulum.
I gave up on Meshtastic on 868, I have been experimenting on 432, ham licence helps here.
But this looks interesting. Another rabbit warren you have pushed me down Andy!
Haha it's all good fun! You should try LoRa aprs as well. 😁
Well really simply this will catch on! think i'll get PMR446 and tape the mic in CW lol
Freebanding
Did you get married recently Andy?
Great video,
Exploring lots of different technologies that everyone has already found out don't scale 🤦 Encouraging people to waste more money. Unsubscribed
I wasn't impressed with Meshtastic, so I sold everything. Several nodes, high gain antennas, the whole lot.
Yes, sadly this has been a bit of a trend lately.
Meshtastic is just firmware/software the hardware can be re programmed
My issue is if any frequencies conflict causing more drop outs
I and a small group have just piled up some boards, parts, components. Couple hundred $$US worth. Planned to deploy about 6 standalone solar nodes and see what happens. One person has thoughts of using with CERT and ARES EmComm type activities.
Should I act fast before the Amazon Return Period expires?
This guy really isnt a good source for meshtastic info, hes all over the place and not really accurate.
Watch out for ETSI RFID on 868mhz band
why you shit talking meshtastic after so much shilling bruv
No interest in this barebones project. And honestly probably wont watch any more of your videos if you're not making meshtastic content.
This isn't a meshtastic channel🤣
@@andykirby well those are the only videos I watch of yours 🤷🏼♂️
Meshtastic was a fad. Over hyped and not very interesting. Still, the boards are cheap so doesn't matter too much.
I went and bought every thing,
Heltec V3
915mHz antenna (from Seattle)
Bender case
And a Sony 18650 battery,
Only to see no other nodes in my area with the right settings… kind of wasted $90
Hopefully some nodes will show up on the app someday…