Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!
Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.
Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.
You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means?
What is the use case?
It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate.
Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep.
The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times.
Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.
A lot of people use it just to chat with friends and family in a fun way.
Of course the preppers and privacy evangelists see it as a means to get ready for living in a hostile environment. Being fair to them, things don't look awesome in the US.
I bet a few criminals use it, but it's still very niche.
More practically, I'm going to try it out while camping this summer. In areas with low or no cell coverage, my phone is useless or dies quickly. Throw a repeater in a tree, and hand your friends nodes.
From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or lune-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters.
My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet.
Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent.
I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved.
I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested.
KR4KZI 73
It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.
https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect.
There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide
If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient.
Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...
There's no mention of Meshtastic.
MeshCore didn’t “fork” from Meshtastic. Meshtastic is a lost cause, with toxic incompetent devs.
Nor did it fork from itself. The official website/discord changed, and the community abandoned a cuck of a human being.
You’d know that if you had the ability to read, but clearly you don’t. I just realized you won’t be able to read this either. Sad.