Questions/Comments

Why does meshtastic work well in our area?

Meshtastic works well in our area because of the ideal mountain and valley geography. The valley is surrounded on two sides by a long chain of mountains. Locating Meshtastic radios on these mountains allows for an ideal coverage scenario:

  1. People in the valley can reach a mountain-top radio to send their messages. If they dont have a line-of-site to the mountain-top, perhaps a nearby radio can reach the mountain top and relay the message for you.

  2. Once a message reaches a mountain-top radio, it gets repeated to all the other mountain-top radios, allowing the message to travel from mountain to mountain, covering a long distance in the process.

What is the LORA configuration in our area?

The area uses the default LongFast Lora Configuration

  • Region: US
  • Preset: Long Range - Fast
  • Number of Hops: User's preference, I am using 5
  • Frequency Slot: 20 (906.875)

How many nodes can be seen?

I have seen numbers range from 50-100+ nodes from my location.

Feel free to send me node reports and I will update here.

Why do I sometimes have trouble sending messages?

Occasionally meshtastic does not confirm messages have been sent. Technically, the meshtastic radio transmits your message, then listens for another radio to re-transmit the message. If your radio hears another radio re-transmit, then the delivery confirmation icon appears.

It is possible that interference or contention may be preventing your message from being received properly by nearby radios. Your radio will retry a few times, but if a nearby radio still doesn't receive your message, you will not receive a delivery confirmation.

Having a better signal to a mountain-top radio may help with sending messages to the entire area. Mountain-top radios are usually configured to 'router' mode because they have such a good transmit position, so if they receive your message they will reliably retransmit it.

Finally, Meshtastic uses a managed-flood algorithm, which works well but may fail in some specific cases.

The Managed Flood Algorithm

Why do I get no responses to my test messages?

Two reasons I can see...

  1. Nobody is currently paying attention to their meshtastic radios. People usually try to respond to test messages, but there are times when many/most are busy.

  2. Your message did not make it very far into the network. Meshtastic messages have a hop limit, every time they jump to another node, the hop count is reduced. When the hop limit reaches 0, it does not get re-transmitted any further. Try bumping up your hop limit, or move your radio to a position where it can reach a mount-top router.

More questions or comments?

Send them and will update this page.

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