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Comment by 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.

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Gigachad

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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.

    • bb88  1 day ago

      But did all the nodes and repeaters update to the version of meshtastic with routing? Meshcore started with routing out of the box.

      I don't think it's the noise that's too high, my original understanding of the meshtastic 2.0 protocol (from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU) was that an edge device would receive priority. So the message might go the wrong direction, say. Or, worse, a meshtastic radio in a basement might get priority.

      Because they didn't understand (or care about) network topologies from the start and reliable message transmission, not to mention the versions of devices that are still on their network, I'm guessing it's gonna be a couple more years before they finally get their act together.

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