{"id":226718,"date":"2025-10-20T05:21:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T05:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/226718\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T05:21:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T05:21:18","slug":"meshtastic-a-tale-of-two-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/226718\/","title":{"rendered":"Meshtastic: A Tale Of Two Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I\u2019m honest with myself, I don\u2019t really need access to an off-grid, fault-tolerant, mesh network like Meshtastic<\/a>. The weather here in New Jersey isn\u2019t quite so dynamic that there\u2019s any great chance the local infrastructure will be knocked offline, and while I do value my privacy as much as any other self-respecting hacker, there\u2019s nothing in my chats that\u2019s sensitive enough that it needs to be done off the Internet.<\/p>\n

But damn it, do I want it. The idea that everyday citizens of all walks of life are organizing and building out their own communications network with DIY hardware and open source software is incredibly exciting to me. It\u2019s like the best parts of a cyberpunk novel, without all the cybernetic implants, pollution, and over-reaching megacorps. Well, we\u2019ve got those last two, but you know what I mean.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Meshtastic maps are never exhaustive, but this gives an idea of node density in Philly versus surrounding area.<\/p>\n

Even though I found the Meshtastic concept appealing, my seemingly infinite backlog of projects kept me from getting involved until relatively recently. It wasn\u2019t until I got my hands on the Hacker Pager<\/a> that my passing interest turned into a full blown obsession. But it\u2019s perhaps not for the reason you might think. Traveling around to different East Coast events with the device in my bag, it would happily chirp away when within range of Philadelphia or New York, but then fall silent again once I got home. While I\u2019d get the occasional notification of a nearby node, my area had nothing like the robust and active mesh networks found in those cities.<\/p>\n

Well, they say you should be the change you want to see in the world, so I decided to do something about it. Obviously I wouldn\u2019t be able to build up an entire network by myself, but I figured that if I started standing up some nodes, others might notice and follow suit. It was around this time that Seeed Studio introduced the SenseCAP Solar node, which looked like a good way to get started. So I bought two of them with the idea of putting one on my house and the other on my parent\u2019s place down the shore.<\/p>\n

The results weren\u2019t quite what I expected, but it\u2019s certainly been an interesting experience so far, and today I\u2019m even more eager to build up the mesh than I was in the beginning.<\/p>\n

Starting on Easy Mode<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t make a conscious decision to start my experiment at my parent\u2019s house. Indeed, located some 60 miles (96 km) from where I live, any progress in building out a mesh network over there wouldn\u2019t benefit me back home. But it was the beginning of summer, they have a pool, and my daughters love to swim. As such, we spent nearly every weekend there which gave me plenty of time to tinker.<\/p>\n

For those unfamiliar with New Jersey\u2019s Southern Shore area, the coastline itself is dotted with vacation spots such as Wildwood, Atlantic City, and Long Beach Island. This is where the tourists go to enjoy the beaches, boardwalks, cotton candy, and expensive rental homes. But move slightly inland, and you\u2019ll find a marshland permeated with a vast network of bays, creeks, and tributaries. For each body of water large enough to get a boat through, you\u2019ll find a small town or even an unincorporated community that in the early 1900s would have been bustling with oyster houses and hunting shacks, but today might only be notable for having their own Wawa.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To infinity, and beyond.<\/p>\n

My parents are in one of those towns that doesn\u2019t have a Wawa. Its very quiet, the skies are dark, and there\u2019s not much more than marsh and water all around. So when I ran the SenseCAP Solar up their 20 foot (6 m) flagpole, which in a former life was actually the mast from a sailing catamaran, the results were extremely impressive.<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t had the radio up for more than a few hours before my phone pinged with a message. We chatted back and forth a bit, and I found that my new mesh friend was an amateur radio operator living on Long Beach Island, and that he too had just recently started experimenting with Meshtastic. He was also, incidentally, a fan of Hackaday. (Hi, Leon!) He mentioned that his setup was no more advanced than an ESP32 dev board sitting in his window, and yet we were reliably communicating at a range of approximately 6 miles (9 km).<\/p>\n

Encouraged, I decided to leave the radio online all night. In the morning, I was shocked to find it had picked up more than a dozen new nodes. Incredibly, it was even able to sniff out a few nodes that I recognized from Philadelphia, 50 miles (80 km) to the west. I started to wonder if it was possible that I might actually be able to reach my own home, potentially establishing a link clear across the state.<\/p>\n

Later that day, somebody on an airplane fired off a few messages on the way out of Philadelphia International Airport. Seeing the messages was exciting enough, but through the magic of mesh networking, it allowed my node to temporarily see networks at an even greater distance. I picked up one node that was more than 100 miles (160 km) away in Aberdeen, Maryland.<\/p>\n

I was exhilarated by these results, and eager to get back home and install the second SenseCAP Solar node. If these were the kind of results I was getting in the middle of nowhere, surely I\u2019d make even more contacts in a dense urban area.<\/p>\n

Reality Comes Crashing Home<\/p>\n

You see, at this point I had convinced myself that the reason I wasn\u2019t getting any results back at home was the relatively meager antenna built into the Hacker Pager. Now that I had a proper node with an antenna bigger than my pinkie finger, I was sure I\u2019d get better results. Especially since I\u2019d be placing the radio even higher this time \u2014 with a military surplus fiberglass mast clamped into the old TV antenna mount on my three story house, the node would be around 40 feet (12 m) above the ground.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The mast gets my node above the neighbor\u2019s roofs, but just barely.<\/p>\n

But when I opened the Meshtastic app the day after getting my home node installed, I was greeted with\u2026.nothing. Not a single node was detected in a 24 hour period. This seemed very odd given my experience down the shore, but I brushed it off. After all, Meshtastic nodes only occasionally announce their presence when they aren\u2019t actively transmitting.<\/p>\n

Undaunted, I made plans with a nearby friend to install a node at his place. His home is just 1.2 miles (1.9 km) from mine, and given the casual 6 mile (9 km) contact I had made at my parent\u2019s place, it seemed like this would be an easy first leg of our fledgling network.<\/p>\n

Yet when we stood up a temporary node in his front yard, messages between it and my house were only occasionally making it through. Worse, the signal strength displayed in the application was abysmal. It was clear that, even at such a short range, an intermediary node would be necessary to get our homes reliably connected.<\/p>\n

At this point, I was feeling pretty dejected. The incredible results I got when using Meshtastic in the sticks had clearly given me a false sense of what the technology was capable of in an urban environment. To make matters even worse, some further investigation found that my house was about the worst possible place to try and mount a node.<\/p>\n

For one thing, until I bothered to look it up, I never realized my house was located in a small valley. According to online line-of-sight tools<\/a>, I\u2019m essentially at the bottom of a bowl. As if that wasn\u2019t bad enough, I noted that the Meshtastic application was showing an inordinate number of bad packets. After consulting with those more experienced with the project, I now know this to be an indicator of a noisy RF environment. Which may also explain the exceptionally poor reception I get when trying to fly my FPV drone around the neighborhood, but that\u2019s a story for another day.<\/p>\n

A More Pragmatic Approach<\/p>\n

While I was disappointed that I couldn\u2019t replicate my seaside Meshtastic successes at home, I\u2019m not discouraged. I\u2019ve learned a great deal about the technology, especially its limitations. Besides, the solution is simple enough \u2014 we need more nodes, and so the campaign to get nearby friends and family interested in the project has begun. We\u2019ve already found another person in a geographically strategic position who\u2019s willing to host a node on their roof, and as I write this a third Seeed SenseCAP Solar sits ready for installation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>At the same time, the performance of Meshtastic in a more rural setting has inspired me to push further in that region. I\u2019m in the process of designing a custom node specifically tailored for the harsh marine environment, and have identified several potential locations where I can deploy them in the Spring. With just a handful of well-placed nodes, I believe it should be possible to cover literally hundreds of square miles.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m now fighting a battle on two fronts, but thankfully, I\u2019m not alone. In the months since I\u2019ve started this project, I\u2019ve noticed a steady uptick in the number of detected nodes. Even here at home, I\u2019ve finally started to pick up some chatter from nearby nodes. There\u2019s no denying it, the mesh is growing everyday.<\/p>\n

My advice to anyone looking to get into Meshtastic is simple. Whether you\u2019re in the boonies, or stuck in the middle of a metropolis, pick up some compatible hardware, mount it as high as you can manage, and wait. It might not happen overnight, but eventually your device is going to ping with that first message \u2014 and that\u2019s when the real obsession starts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If I\u2019m honest with myself, I don\u2019t really need access to an off-grid, fault-tolerant, mesh network like Meshtastic.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[64,63,237,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-226718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}