New Year, New Mesh(core)

I'm working to improve Meshcore in SW Idaho...

But... What about Meshtastic?

Most of my testing and use of Meshtastic and Meshcore over the past year has been in extremely remote areas of Idaho, Oregon, Montana, and various other locations where my family has camped. In these situations, Meshtastic/Meshcore has been our only way to send text messages among us (each adult has a Garmin Inreach, but those text messages can take up to 10-20 minutes round-trip).

We've been successful enough (mostly with Meshcore) that we've significantly reduced how often we carry our small ham radio handhelds (or FRS with non-ham friends/family) and mostly rely on the mesh for group communication. Lora Meshes work really well in these scenarios, and I can't imagine our family camping without it now. Meshcore makes it easy to keep track of us as we go on hikes, kayaking, biking, or whatever. Both Meshtastic and Meshcore worked in our testing. But we found reliability and user experience were far better on with MeshCore, so at this point, we're exclusively using it when camping.

I've been watching Meshtastic's growth in the Boise area, and frankly, I've never been happy with it in larger deployments. It's great if you want to see a lot of nodes on a map, but try talking to a friend across town; it works just enough to give you hope, but not enough to be useful. Group conversations are laughably bad. For a while, I thought the issue was mainly the prevalence of LongFast defaults and the mesh being too crowded for it, but my testing of Meshtastic in isolation had similar results. I tested a private mesh on MediumFast in the Treasure Valley for several months, with a couple of nodes on mountains, and even with just a handful of users, routing and deliverability weren't as reliable as I wanted.

More recently, there's been an effort to move Southern Idaho to MediumFast on slot 51 and the "Freq51" channel. I applaud this effort, and I may keep a node on it, but in my testing, it still seems to suffer from meshtastic's reliability issues.

There's a lot I like about Meshtastic, and in some use cases it works well enough. On the other hand, Meshcore just works. I wish there were a middle ground on some of the design decisions for both of them, but at the moment, I have to put my effort into the one that actually sends messages reliably.

Meshcore

Meshcore has worked exceptionally well for our family's off-grid texting needs, but will it work in an urban area with a lot more users? Well, yeah, apparently it will. That was the primary design requirement, and numerous examples of these networks have been deployed around the world. Most of those networks were built by people who'd tried to build larger Meshtastic networks.

But of course, I did my own testing... I've been playing with Meshcore in the valley for a bit now, and it's been very quiet. But that's started changing recently, as Meshcore has gained a lot of hype online, driving real-world momentum. A handful of folks in southwest Idaho have neighborhood repeaters, but no one has put repeaters up high to help connect these isolated networks. I'm working to change that (and I know a couple others are as well).

A handful of folks in southwest Idaho have neighborhood repeaters, but no one has put up high-altitude repeaters to connect them. I'm working to change that.

New Repeater - BRR-1

On New Year's Eve, I deployed the first wide-area (ridge-top) Meshcore repeater in SW Idaho, which provides coverage for the vast majority of the Treasure Valley and surrounding areas. This is a temporary repeater in a temporary spot, but based on initial positive tests and feedback this evening, I'll be working on a more permanent deployment in the next few weeks. I'm also working on a couple of other locations up high to fill in weak areas. This one low-power solar node has connected all of the valley repeaters, and I'm now seeing a total of 18 nodes in SW Idaho. I've already had several reliable conversations with other users via that repeater and hops through the various neighborhood repeaters. Reliable conversations with people 5-6 hops away (where all the messages get delivered, acknowledged, and shown in the proper order) are awesome. More of that, please!

Maps...

As we grow this mesh, people need to know it's here, so I'm working to make sure we show up on the various maps. Yesterday, I added an observer that feeds data into the letsmesh system, so now our local mesh shows up there (we can also use it to diagnose issues or look for improvements). You can find a real-time SW Idaho Meshcore map by going to the BOI region on letsmesh.

Branching Out

Once we get a couple more high-elevation repeaters around the Treasure Valley, I'd like to start working to link our mesh to other areas of Idaho. I'll be looking for easy wins at first and have a few in mind... But I'd love to build a backbone to connect more rural communities to the larger IdahoMesh.

Connect with us!

Discord

I set up an Idaho Mesh Discord for us a few weeks ago, but I haven't promoted it yet, so at the moment, it's lonely in there – now seems like a good time to start promoting and using it. I've added 'IdahoMesh.org' to BRR-1's node info to help point people here.

#idahomesh

If you want to talk network buildout or related Idaho Mesh topics, hop in #idahomesh on Meshcore. Anyone can join: go to add a channel, click the button to add a hashtag channel, and type in "idahomesh" – or click add channel and scan this QR code.

DM Me

Of course, if you're on Meshcore, you can DM me – here's my contact info.

Thanks

If you've made it this far, thanks. If you have ideas, questions, or want to help, please do reach out here, via Discord, or via #idahomesh. Thanks again and Happy New Year!

Join our Idaho Mesh Discord