If I’m honest with myself, I don’t really need access to an off-grid, fault-tolerant, mesh network like Meshtastic. The weather here in New Jersey isn’t quite so dynamic that there’s 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’s nothing in my chats that’s sensitive enough that it needs to be done off the Internet.
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’s like the best parts of a cyberpunk novel, without all the cybernetic implants, pollution, and over-reaching megacorps. Well, we’ve got those last two, but you know what I mean.
Even though I found the Meshtastic concept appealing, my seemingly infinite backlog of projects kept me from getting involved until relatively recently. It wasn’t until I got my hands on the Hacker Pager that my passing interest turned into a full blown obsession. But it’s 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’d get the occasional notification of a nearby node, my area had nothing like the robust and active mesh networks found in those cities.
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’t 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’s place down the shore.
The results weren’t quite what I expected, but it’s certainly been an interesting experience so far, and today I’m even more eager to build up the mesh than I was in the beginning.
Starting on Easy Mode
I didn’t make a conscious decision to start my experiment at my parent’s house. Indeed, located some 60 miles (96 km) from where I live, any progress in building out a mesh network over there wouldn’t 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.
For those unfamiliar with New Jersey’s 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’ll 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’ll 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.
My parents are in one of those towns that doesn’t have a Wawa. Its very quiet, the skies are dark, and there’s 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.
I hadn’t 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).
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.
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.
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’d make even more contacts in a dense urban area.
Reality Comes Crashing Home
You see, at this point I had convinced myself that the reason I wasn’t 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’d get better results. Especially since I’d be placing the radio even higher this time — 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.
But when I opened the Meshtastic app the day after getting my home node installed, I was greeted with….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’t actively transmitting.
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’s place, it seemed like this would be an easy first leg of our fledgling network.
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.
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.
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, I’m essentially at the bottom of a bowl. As if that wasn’t 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’s a story for another day.
A More Pragmatic Approach
While I was disappointed that I couldn’t replicate my seaside Meshtastic successes at home, I’m not discouraged. I’ve learned a great deal about the technology, especially its limitations. Besides, the solution is simple enough — we need more nodes, and so the campaign to get nearby friends and family interested in the project has begun. We’ve already found another person in a geographically strategic position who’s willing to host a node on their roof, and as I write this a third Seeed SenseCAP Solar sits ready for installation.
At the same time, the performance of Meshtastic in a more rural setting has inspired me to push further in that region. I’m 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.
I’m now fighting a battle on two fronts, but thankfully, I’m not alone. In the months since I’ve started this project, I’ve noticed a steady uptick in the number of detected nodes. Even here at home, I’ve finally started to pick up some chatter from nearby nodes. There’s no denying it, the mesh is growing everyday.
My advice to anyone looking to get into Meshtastic is simple. Whether you’re 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 — and that’s when the real obsession starts.
Until you do. Remember, if you don’t hold the keys… eventually someone else (a bad actor, a despot, a state-sanctioned spy agency) can lock you out.
Contrary to popular belief, or “first-world” infrastructure is not immutable.
I recommend everyone familiarize themselves with Meshtastic/LoRa, ATAK, AREDN and so on… sooner rather than later.
Finally a HackaDay article I cam really relate too. I too have been dreaming of a Mesh node device on my roof… but I don’t have any real NEED for one other than curiosity. This article has inspired me to finally buy a node.
Good thing too, because after awhile, “immutable” translates as “stagnant/stuck in the past.”
“ there’s nothing in my chats that’s sensitive enough that it needs to be done off the Internet.”
It is all in the eye of the beholder.
It sounds like the common “I don’t have anything to hide” objection to privacy.
Technology exists to identify the author of a piece of text with just a few sentences. Everyone has a unique way to write things. If you add type speed you can get even more accurate.
Even if the context of the message or the author is not sensitive the timing can be. It is very useful information to know if someone is sleeping or awake, at home or at work. It’s called “pattern of life” POL. It’s used by detectives to catch criminals. But can also be used by burglars to pick the right house.
I was referring to “while I do value my privacy as much as any other self-respecting hacker, there’s nothing in my chats that’s sensitive enough that it needs to be done off the Internet”
(I tried to reply to “Then” but accidentally replied directly to the article instead)
You do not know… Once the tsa picked me out and questioned me for 6 hours because they found CIA emails on me… they were looking in my spam folder… ymmv
I’m glad they never searched my devices. Though half the time they want to pat me down. I guess I’m irresistible LOL.
I don’t have anything to hide, but “they” don’t have to know that.
Loesje
Ok, I admit it, your article tipped me over the edge. I’ve ordered one. Been meaning to for a long time anyway…
Good read. We have about 85 plus active nodes across Cape Town now, and with one node placed on top of a mountain, we have linked to the town of Worcester, 100 km away from Cape Town, on the other side of the mountain.
IMO, it’s most fun as a war driving type exercise. It can be satisfying to spot new nodes, or really distant nodes. For actual communications it suffers from both a lack of nodes in rural areas and overcrowding in the cities (NYC is crazy if reliable coms are your goal).
Meshtastic sounds kind of cool and I might decide to give it a try just for grins, especially since I live on a steep hillside with line of sight for tens of miles in most directions. But it seems to me that for actual emergency communication when the brown stuff hits the fan that GMRS is more practical for local contacts and ham radio can’t be beat for longer paths.
What am I missing?
I hope none of this feels like an attack/argument; you asked what you’re missing, so I wanted to point at some things.
Meshtastic’s barrier to entry is lower, if only because of the licensing requirements for both GMRS and ham radio. Yes, you can transmit without a license in an emergency; the point is that you can prep and practice today with mesh devices, with no licensing or testing requirements.
Meshtastic can be more resilient. GMRS (i.e. VHF/UHF) radio ranges are relatively short and line-of-sight, if you don’t have repeaters alive locally. If you do have repeaters locally, what’s the relative likelihood of a single repeater surviving a weather event, vs the likelihood of all the mesh devices going down?
Radio is synchronous; Meshtastic is async. Do you want/need all comms in a SHTF scenario to be sync?
Meshtastic is trivially plugged into ATAK, which might be really, really useful for SAR stuff in your area (and here again, practice with your community is critical, so a reduced barrier to entry on the fundamental tool is important)
If you’re prepping for a diversity of scenarios, a diversity of tech and tools is a good thing. GMRS and Ham radios meet some needs; Mesh stuff meets other use cases. They’re not mutually exclusive; they’re complementary.
One time, I wanted to learn about Meshtastic when I was on vacation, so I brought some of the supported boards with me and quickly learned that it is really difficult to set up if you’re somewhere without internet. The recommended firmware flasher is a web app. So is the official client (or it’s an app, so you need to get an app store), and the documentation. When I got home, I learned about how I could have self-hosted all this stuff, but it’s not like you can download one big archive file and have everything ready to go instantly.
It’s been hard to accept the claims of “fully off line, fully off grid” ever since. Even if it’s technically true, it’s not practically true.
Would be a good project to make a raspberry pi image or something that has it all, but I’ve not gotten to it yet.
The things you used, like client from the play store and web-based flasher, are made purely for your convenience. It was your choice to make it “practically not true”. You don’t need internet connection to use Meshtastic.
There is no need to make a special raspberry pi image because all it takes to make pi usable with Meshtastic is installing python and meshtastic package, all done with standard OS utilities. Setup is easy to carry on over the serial using cli utility. Later on you can use a TUI client called contact.
Android or Apple phone is not required at all, it’s just what everyone has in their pockets anyway so the guides tend to be phone-centric.
Again, only obvious in hindsight. You absolutely do need an internet connection to onboard meshtastic, for every step that starts with git clone or pip install. Yes, once they are installed they will work offline but you have to know you need them first. There’s no how-to-use-meshtastic.pdf you can download and read at your leisure until you have internet again.
Might be too harsh of a criticism. Obviously, you’ll need an internet connection (and a credit card) to purchase the boards in the first place. You’ll also need an OS installed on your computer.
Optimally you need to prepare before, not when the internet is already down. I don’t think you can fault Meshtastic project for that. Once you have prepared yourself, you’re likely to have a few devices, bootstrap files and knowledge to provide for others in need.
ok, why not installing meshtastic on church building?
Nice writeup; just getting started in the MTic world.
Will kick off a solar build in the next few months that gets mounted at around 780ft MSL – look forward to see what happens. Lots of locations around for small solar-nodes to keep the messages hopping … :)
How is your experience regarding powering the SenseCAP fully off solar and battery?
On the roof of your house I guess it wouldn’t be hard to run up a power cable. But what if you want to place a node at some strategic position in the woods or on a summit? There you would have to rely on solar. Would that also work in winter, with only a few hours of daylight and the batteries getting cold?
I really like the Lilygo T-Deck Pro, a Blackberry style Meshstatic device. No need for a phone as HID and you can even put offline map tiles on a SD card to see your (and other node’s) location. Usually I hand it to my son when we go skiing or hiking.
https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-plus-meshtastic
I have a Hacker Pager the antenna is meh. But there is room to add an antenna yourself.