Tags: #meshtastic #radio
I have a long-standing interest in radio technology, I am a card-carrying radio amateur, although I have been "QRT" (off-air) since shortly after completing my full license exam, due to child care vacuuming up all my free time for the past few years. Until that changes I have enjoyed a low-demand form of radio called Meshtastic, which has really taken off around the UK this year.
Meshtastic is a simple chat application that runs on top of the Lora-WAN radio standard that's designed to travel long-distances in spite of using low-power by a combination of low bit-rate and error correction techniques. The "mesh" in the name is because it is designed to pass messages between nodes to expand the range possible. It uses license-free radio spectrum so any one is allowed to set up a node and use it.
I've seen a lot of people over-selling the technology as a doomsday replacement for the Internet, or mobile phones, which is nonsense. It is just a basic text messaging app and as it is today the technology just about works and is under heavy development to solve some of the issues people have experienced as traffic has increased beyond the developers wildest dreams.
It has been popular at busy hacker events but once you have hundreds of nodes in a small area the traffic exceeds the capacity of the network and the whole thing comes crashing down.
It's a complex technology that puts a lot of control in the hands of many people who don't know enough to use it considerately. Routing messages from the Internet, or extending the hop count variable can unwittingly flood the local network with useless traffic no one can respond to.
That said these aren't unsolvable issues but more work is needed to improve the the software and a lot of that work is on-going.
I was early on the Meshtastic train, I set up my first Heltec V3 device in January 2024 and at the time there was crickets. Literally no-one was on the air near me, I could send a message and received no reply and for several weeks I received no indication the device even worked! This isn't helped by my location, nestled in a valley I'm hidden from nearby major population centres and the 868MHz UHF frequencies we use here cannot easily past around terrain.
The Heltec is a mobile device though and I was able to take it on road trips across the region and this way I could pick up a few early nodes but not a lot of communication.
As the weeks went by this remained the case until within a couple of days of one another a few more nodes popped up in my area. Ironically I knew two of them personally, people I've crossed paths with at technology groups so an interest in the new Hot Tech was inevitable eventually. In hindsight they were also quite early and after a few weeks of little activity going on they lost interest and dropped off the air. I remained with another local guy who I don't know before but we've had numerous discussions through the summer months as his interest has expanded into different models of Meshtastic hardware. He has even built solar-powered nodes placed on high ground to help us reach out of the valley.
Meshtastic in the north west of England has continued to thrive so far and today there is daily activity on the public channel "LongFast" and presumably more on private channels too. A lot of the users are radio amateurs but not everyone, although I expect it might be a gateway drug into the hobby for a few people.
In the past few weeks we've seen interesting propagation effects from the weather. At one point a path opened up down to London and into the Netherlands. More recently we've seen paths open up across the Irish Sea and nodes in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have popped up and even exchanged a few messages. There is discussion about how these channels might be maintained in future by establishing nodes on high ground with high-gain antennas. Much of this communication hops across via a node on the Isle of Man that is frequently reachable from the north west but I've also seen direct contact spanning 162 miles.
I've seen interest in Meshtastic wax and wane through the year but I'm optimistic that it will continue to grow and improve for the foreseeable future. I'd like to set up nodes at the homes of family members so we have the possibility of communicating off-grid should the need arise although today the distances are too great and there are too many gaps in the mesh. I think there is a need for a democractic communications technology that isn't dependent on telecoms companies but is also private and Meshtastic does seek to meet that need.