• unitedwithme@lemmy.today
      7 days

      It’s biggest use is over the 900MHz “LoRa” (long range about 2-5km) and works well with a multitude of equipment.

      I’ve got some HelTec devices which are sweet.

      Meshtastic = nomadic and point-to-point comms with no middle hardware. Great for hiking in poor reception areas to keep in touch with friends. Supports 7 hops or nodes of indirect communication

      Meshcore = good for building your own network backbone and extends further through I think 64 nodes. Better for static location and densely populated areas.

      Both support encryption, use 900MHz spectrum (no HAM licenses necessary), and can be flashed on loads of hardware.

      Reticulum looks to expands on both of those Pros https://www.reticulumnet.nl/en/comparison/

      Sorry, I’m a huge nerd, this shit is great! I started using LoRa sensors at work to save on battery life, cost, and network infrastructure.

      • punkfungus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6 days

        Correct about Meshcore being 64 hops, but in practice when the network starts to build out that drops to 32 because you use 2-byte path hashes. With a one byte hash you run into a ton of hash collisions. But 32 hops is still plenty enough to traverse huge geographical areas if the repeaters have been placed sensibly.

      • CocaineShrimp@sh.itjust.works
        6 days

        Thank you for this. I’ve been wondering what the difference was between Meshtastic and Meshcore. I figured I’d just use Meshtastic as it was the original, and more people in my area seem to be using it

    • myszka@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7 days

      I’m not an expert, but it is a decentralised network stack that can work over any physical medium, so you and friend can spin up two radios and have text and audio communication, and simple web sites as well as lots of other stuff completely independently from anybody!

        • myszka@lemmy.mlEnglish
          7 days

          It also works over the Internet, so this is the easiest way to try it out. If you want to set up your own physical network, you might want to look into HaLow radio as that’s probably the fastest medium among the available options (way faster than the popular LoRa).