(500 kHz bandwidth is indeed a valid setting for the underlying LoRa protocol, and is used when the radios get certified.)
Unfortunately the community meshes in most/all US metros have coalesced around these settings, meaning one is forced to choose between linking with "the" mesh, or operating legally.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-15/section-15.247...
Separately: while it's cool to chat human-style over these networks, lately I've been thinking that the real value add is last-mile automations. Stuff that won't clog the network like remote-starting your car once or twice a day, and is normally built on top of LTE.
What I think you can do for sure today is poll a sensor over the mesh, unlike the meshtastic way where you generally automatically broadcast telemetry.
Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community.
MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.
Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
Hopefully MT catches up. Their GPLv3 license is much more attractive to me than the MC MIT.
Re: licensing, last thing I read was the MC was... at least awkward: a "core" being "open", and then some "modules" that you need to pay for (to run on your device). I don't really care for a project like this, even if they backpaddled from this scenario. I'd rather wait for yet another third option, that is free open source and would have the supposed protocol improvements.
The good thing is, after all, that the same LoRa radio devices can be flashed with one or the other, if I understood correctly.
There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.
Write me if you are willing to experiment :)
The good news is that almost all Meshtastic hardware can be flashed with the MeshCore firmware (and vice versa). This makes it straightforward to dive into both relatively easily.
the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.
Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.
How exciting!
Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads.
Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215
I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.
I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.
To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.
"Thought experiments about mesh networking"
"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"
"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"
Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."
Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.
particularly the SDR stuff, which is the VAST majority of that section. this is not at all the same target audience as meshtastic:
>A computer with “sufficient” compute power and RAM, to run the ka9q-radio software. KA9Q has stated that a Raspberry Pi 4 is sufficient, and now we have the Raspberry Pi 5 with up to 16 GB of RAM, for only $120.
that's like suggesting the way to fix a wireless problem is to use a wire. otherwise the criticism seems to summarize as "it's slow and bad" and well. okay? that's hardly constructive, whether or not it's accurate.
the whole thing reads like "the solution is left as an exercise to the reader ;)" because it sounds like it's written by and for people who are already experts and just want to read a cathartic list of flaws they already know. and/or "buy better hardware lol". it's not at all the logical slam-dunk that you seem to think it is.
In the article you linked, there are three paragraphs about Meshtastic in a 150-paragraph newsletter about several topics. The criticism seems to be that they they use digipeating, and then it refers to a Fedi thread[1] which is more coherent but still fairly vague. The upshot seems to be that flood routing doesn't scale, which is a fair criticism but feels disproportionate to the level of vitriol against the project.
The Fedi thread also adds that the Meshtastic founders were rude or unprofessional to him but doesn't cite any specifics or evidence.
I see this a lot with Meshtastic. People keep saying the founders are toxic and disrespectful of the community but it's always in these vague terms so I don't know what's driving it.
But specifically in this thread, I agree with sibling poster that you're being disrespectful and arguing ineffectively by pointing to such poor resources and then blaming other people for being unconvinced or confused.
Elsewhere in the newsletter, the author advocates for a form of FDMA, where users operate on different, dynamically allocated frequencies and all of them are received at once. P25 trunked radios used by almost all law enforcement in the US operate on a system like this.
I think the vitriol from those who are in the space either professionally or as an amateur comes from the fact Meshtastic is repeating mistakes we knew about in the 80s at the latest, for which reams if literature freely exists.
It would be more fair to criticize Meshtastic for not being clear enough about the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a low-speed ad-hoc mesh network, and for not actively encouraging people to seek other hardware and software if their use cases are not well-matched to what Meshtastic hardware is capable of. A one size fits all solution simply isn't possible, and Meshtastic can't be the right answer for everyone.
Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing, but I don't even see a movement to switch over to something more robust.
I'd argue it's everything. A network architecture that requires serious fixed infrastructure should probably be an entirely separate project from the ad-hoc mesh formed solely by cheap battery-powered portable/handheld gadgets. And everyone should be realistic about what "meaningful traffic" is for a network with a default data rate of ~1kbps; it's not reasonable to expect that to support the kind of chatter a busy IRC server would see.
Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?
* They made incredibly poorly designed software — the firmware and the mobile apps — and then yell at you for “using it wrong” * The refuse to admit they made a mistake with the 7 hop limit and call you an idiot for not believing in their garbage “simulator” * They write nasty responses to app reviews and GitHub issues because they’re petulant children. Just go read the responses, and look at the hissyfit the of the primary app developer in discord. * They’ve taken down multiple community groups because they decided they needed to be a business rather than an open-source project. Seriously just go look at the history in their discord #trademark channel. They’re on the verge of evil.
All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I have. I emailed them a couple of weeks ago and they responded promptly and professionally.
> All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
You want me to read thousands of GitHub issue comments and discord messages in search of bad behavior?
If you have examples of the Meshtastic team behaving badly, why not link to them? The burden of proof is on you, not me.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I think LoRa messaging is neat but I have no investment or relationship with Meshtastic in particular.
In short, all messages are sent within windows, which include waiting periods within which the broadcasting node listens for any other node to rebroadcast the same message. Upon seeing the message be rebroadcast, it stops attempting to send.
Triangulation will work as long as you transmit. But it will be difficult as LoRa works down to -145dBm which is an extremely weak signal.
The trick is understanding LoRa's trick, which is simply to "skew" the signal across time (via chirps), modulo a window of the configured bandwidth around the center frequency. The key is that the skew rate is purely a function of the spreading factor, bandwidth, and IQ polarity (= pol × BW² / 2^SF), so there's a small-ish finite number of skew rates. So you can just modulate raw IQ data with carriers at each of these skew rates to find one which gives you a bunch of carrier waves that hop around discretely at about twice the symbol rate, looking like an FSK signal. You can then bin this at a factor of, say 2^(SF-2) to correlate the signal and raise it up above the noise floor, on which you can apply any standard triangulation technique.
I'll try vetting this soon and reply to this post with results.
Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?
I live 5 miles west of the maker space in the last photo, and I've been thinking about getting some Meshtastic nodes...
In Europe. See the duty cycle limits summarized at https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#region
I need a few messages transmitted to as many peers as possible once in a while.
Nothing illegal, just a small contribution to the economy.
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