Although everyone has their own reasons for exploring a new hobby, one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Meshtastic and MeshCore has been the incredible accessibility offered by off-grid LoRa mesh networks. You don’t need any expensive hardware or a license to get on the air — armed with a $20 microcontroller dev board and open source software, you could be on the mesh in minutes. Then came the really exciting part, seeing who else was out there. The low barrier of entry and ad-hoc nature of these projects meant there was a good chance you’d soon find yourself exchanging messages with other like-minded folks in the area.
Or at least, that’s how it used to be. With the recent revelation that their default radio configurations have potentially been in violation of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulations governing amateur usage of the 900 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, the users and developers of both Meshtastic and MeshCore have been sent scrambling. Getting in compliance isn’t necessarily a technical challenge. In fact, Meshtastic has already introduced changes aimed to address the issue and anyone running the latest alpha release can be sure that their initial radio configuration will meet FCC standards.
But unfortunately, this introduces a new problem. While it’s easy enough to get new installations of Meshtastic and MeshCore operating in a mode that keeps the FCC happy, doing so breaks compatibility with everything that’s already been deployed. The community will be fractured into distinct strata depending on when they first configured their hardware, with an added dash of confusion from the more rebellious users who will undoubtedly refuse to migrate over to the new settings.
Switch to Reticulum. Meshtastic/Meshcore were never scalable traffic/node wise.
Wdym? Reticulum is super promising, but it needs a path, no? I could well be misunderstanding, but Meshtastic is more like “infrastructure”. You can actually send Reticulum over Meshtastic/Meshcore (though you may choke the network :/). Seems to me that even if you’re excited about Reticulum, you’d still want those Meshtastic networks built out.
RNode is the better LoRa interface than putting Reticulum over Meshtastic
OK cool. I’m just getting started with this stuff. Met with friends about Reticulum last night, and a different group about Meshtastic tomorrow.
Setting up some nodes in Barcelona this week!
totally different things. reticulum is routing, meshtastic is the transport. you don’t route anything without a transport
I think LoRA is what you meant and yes, both use it. Reticulum has its own routing protocol while Meshtastic broadcasts to all connected devices.
in that case, meshtastic does not do routing. like a network switch or a wifi AP is not a router (except combined consumer devices but that’s an other thing)
though, doesn’t meshtastic have some kind of relayed operation? that would count as routing, I think.
Right! I think Meshtastic is closer to how switches work with STP and network broadcasts. This allows for multiple devices to relay the same message but it’s not the same as routing.
Reticulum goes a step further with directing messages to specific paths and destinations in the network like a router would as you said, rather than broadcasting the encrypted message to all it can reach.
Reticulum can route directly over raw LoRa via RNode. Meshtastic is only one possible underlay, not a required transport.
Speaking of Reticulum, the Reticulum Community Wiki is an excellent learning resource for those curious.
Meshtastic ya but Meshcore is definitely way more scalable.
I found it really difficult to use/understand and the mobile app is so slow.