I first heard about Meshtastic from a blog post that made the rounds on Hacker News.

The author lived on a boat and used Meshtastic radios to stay in touch without cellular networks. Meshtastic allows you to send short text messages (around 200 characters) over long ranges without cell towers or satellites. It works by creating a mesh network of low-power LoRa devices that relay messages on behalf of peers. Because it uses license-free radio frequencies (in the ~915 MHz ISM band), no ham license is required.

My First Radio

I ordered a pair of Heltec V3 LoRa radios (the ones I bought), which are small devices based on the ESP32 microcontroller with a LoRa modem. These radios didn't come with GPS, which in hindsight I regret because Meshtastic can share your location if a GPS is present. I also picked up a third-party antenna upgrade, since the community warned that the cheap antennas bundled with these devices are nearly useless (yet another thing I learned in hindsight)

Out of the box, the devices had outdated firmware and wouldn't communicate with current Meshtastic apps. Fortunately, flashing the latest firmware was straightforward using the official Meshtastic Web Flasher (a browser-based tool at flasher.meshtastic.org). By connecting the device via USB and using Chrome (which supports the WebSerial API), I flashed the newest Meshtastic firmware without installing any software.

Initial Setup

With fresh firmware, I could configure and manage the radios using the Meshtastic mobile app (available for Android/iOS) over Bluetooth. There's also a web client (client.meshtastic.org) that works over USB or Wi-Fi. One quirk I learned: many Meshtastic devices can work over both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but you typically use one interface at a time for management. On my device, it was not possible to use both at the same time, which led to some confusion.

After setup, I had my two devices chatting with each other. Sending a message from one device would pop up on the other in a few seconds. Meshtastic uses a mesh protocol where every node repeats messages, so two devices in direct range will communicate one-to-one, and if more nodes are around they can hop messages further. I noticed that if I tried sending when only one device was on, the app would show Waiting to be acknowledged... and eventually Maximum retransmission reached. In other words, my message went nowhere because no other node heard it.

First Contact

Up to this point, I hadn't heard any traffic besides my own test messages. I suspected I was the only Meshtastic user in my immediate area (the far west suburbs of Chicago). I left one radio powered on and placed it by a second-story window facing toward the city. The next morning, I was surprised to see that it had logged messages from a handful of unknown nodes overnight.

Looking up the node identifiers online, I discovered a website called MeshMap that shows public Meshtastic nodes on a map. Sure enough, some of the node names I saw appeared on a community mesh map of the Chicagoland area. A few even had labels referencing ChiMesh. There's an active group of Meshtastic enthusiasts in Chicago, Chicagoland Mesh, and somehow my little device had picked up their transmissions from roughly 40-50 miles away. This was an early sign that mesh networking can extend beyond line-of-sight with the help of intermediate nodes.

Joining a Local Community

Excited by this discovery, I joined the Chicagoland Mesh (ChiMesh) Discord server and introduced myself. To my surprise, there was another member only a mile or two from my house. We coordinated a simple experiment: he sent a test message from his device at home, and I was able to receive it on mine. However, when I tried to reply, he never saw my message. It became clear that while I could hear the network, my transmission range was too short for others to hear me.

Community members quickly pointed to the antenna as the culprit. The stock rubber-duck antenna that came with my Heltec radio was likely low-quality. I switched to the high-gain antenna I bought and tried again. This time my messages started getting through. Antenna quality (and placement) makes a huge difference in radio range.

Expanding the Network

My success rekindled interest among a couple of local makers. Some fellow members of my local makerspace had dabbled with Meshtastic earlier but stopped due to the lack of active users. With my second device to spare, we set it up as a relay node at the makerspace, which is a few miles from my house. Positioned near a roofline, this node acted like a little tower, rebroadcasting messages between my home and the other member's location.

It took a bit of fiddling with placement and settings, but eventually we managed to pass messages between our homes via the makerspace node. It wasn't instantaneous or foolproof, but messages eventually hopped from my device to the relay and then to my friend's device, reaching farther than any single link could.

Next Steps

To better understand and improve our coverage, we started playing with the Meshtastic Site Planner. This is a web tool that lets you simulate radio coverage on a map given a node's location, antenna, and power. Being in a river valley, our area has some challenging terrain that limits range. The planner helped confirm that putting a node on higher ground (a tall building) could dramatically extend reach.

In the coming months, we plan to upgrade to better antennas (perhaps an outdoor mounted one on a mast) and add more nodes at strategic spots. I'm also interested in experimenting with Meshtastic's other capabilities. For example, it can interface with sensors and send telemetry. A fun project idea is an off-grid weather station broadcasting its data over the mesh network.

Continuing the Exploration

Working with Meshtastic has been fun. It's impressive how a few inexpensive devices can form a communications network covering many miles. The system is limited, but within those constraints it feels magical to send a message into the ether and have it hop across a county line to a stranger.

Meshtastic isn't very useful alone, but as more people join, the mesh becomes stronger and more useful for everyone. If you're in the Illinois Fox Valley area and interested, feel free to reach out or drop by our makerspace meetup - we'd love to grow the network. And if you're elsewhere, consider looking up Meshtastic groups in your region. I hope to see you on the air.