In the LoRA/radio device sense, Meshtastic[1] is probably the easiest to get started with. It's the biggest player in the space, has devices that come pre-installed and configured, the most likely chance of making contact with someone else, etc. MeshCore[2] is the other major player. It's newer and tends to have been adopted by communities that have run into issues with large Meshtastic networks.
If you meant PC-based mesh networking, I'll leave someone more knowledgeable to speak about that :).
I've had some experience with both Meshtastic and Reticulum, and Meshtastic software was mostly unusable for me even with 3-node networks. E.g. a node sends a message and gets a successful delivery notification from the receiver but the receiver fails to display the message to the user. Reticulum was mostly working fine. Haven't tried MeshCore yet.
Meshtastic also doesn't really... work. Let me qualify that. You can get a couple of nodes for cheap, and you can (with a bit of work) get messages to go between them. The problem is coordination between nodes is required for the network as a whole to work. Specifically, user adjustable node -local settings can overwhelm the network for everyone else around you. Defcon "solves" this by providing firmware to flash with preconfigured settings tuned for the event. But hopefully this makes the problem obvious - in some other scenario that you might hope to use them - and TBC, my goals for a long range, non-cellular network mesh network are for connectivity during a hurricane/flood/firestorm/earthquake/tornado/etc.
An open implementation is preferred, because it drives down the cost of hardware and lets users purchase the grade of hardware they want. But if it doesn't work, an imperfect proprietary solution(s) available now > hypothetical perfect future solution.
In the LoRA/radio device sense, Meshtastic[1] is probably the easiest to get started with. It's the biggest player in the space, has devices that come pre-installed and configured, the most likely chance of making contact with someone else, etc. MeshCore[2] is the other major player. It's newer and tends to have been adopted by communities that have run into issues with large Meshtastic networks.
If you meant PC-based mesh networking, I'll leave someone more knowledgeable to speak about that :).
[1] - https://meshtastic.org/
[2] - https://meshcore.co.uk/
I've had some experience with both Meshtastic and Reticulum, and Meshtastic software was mostly unusable for me even with 3-node networks. E.g. a node sends a message and gets a successful delivery notification from the receiver but the receiver fails to display the message to the user. Reticulum was mostly working fine. Haven't tried MeshCore yet.
Meshtastic also doesn't really... work. Let me qualify that. You can get a couple of nodes for cheap, and you can (with a bit of work) get messages to go between them. The problem is coordination between nodes is required for the network as a whole to work. Specifically, user adjustable node -local settings can overwhelm the network for everyone else around you. Defcon "solves" this by providing firmware to flash with preconfigured settings tuned for the event. But hopefully this makes the problem obvious - in some other scenario that you might hope to use them - and TBC, my goals for a long range, non-cellular network mesh network are for connectivity during a hurricane/flood/firestorm/earthquake/tornado/etc.
An open implementation is preferred, because it drives down the cost of hardware and lets users purchase the grade of hardware they want. But if it doesn't work, an imperfect proprietary solution(s) available now > hypothetical perfect future solution.
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