Comment by dreadsword

1 day ago

For dense areas, mesh applications like BitChat (Jack Dorsey) could bypass the need for a network with p2p bluetooth mesh networks. And works with existing devices, vs something like meshtastic which needs an installed base (afaik).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchat

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dreadsword

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Gigachad  1 day ago

Does it actually work though? My experience with Meshtastic is it’s so difficult to get a message delivered beyond the nearest hop that it’s almost useless. And Bluetooth has a significantly shorter range than LoRa.

  • wiml  1 day ago

    The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though.

    For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar/etc might work better. But I'd love to see a couple of thorough case studies on that kind of system, they've been around for many years targeting related scenarios.

    • Gigachad  1 day ago

      I’ve tried MeshCore as well and discovered zero nodes. At least what I’ve seen it looks like Meshtastic implemented the same routing fixes MeshCore has.

      I think the issue is more that getting a message many kilometres out using a couple of nodes sitting in non prime locations is just unreliable. The noise is too high. There’s also a limit on how many messages can be sent while using flood routing.

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