At time of writing (2025-09-27, plus or minus a timezone), there does not appear to be any serious attempt to secure application-layer message contents. (At least, not yet)
My hope is that this cool new radio link option will still gain traction and grow and develop without painting itself into a corner, security-wise.
Meshtastic is GPLv3. So all source code will always be available.
Meshcore is MIT licensed. And closed source applications already started to creep in. See the smartphone apps and the T-Echo implementation. This has already the classic smell of ham radio projects I honestly don't want to support.
The maintainers of MT are friendly. The people using it - not all of them. Like all community driven projects.
It seems like there are some people in the Meshtastic and MeshCore community who have it out for each other, for reasons beyond me.
I've only personally tested Meshtastic, and from a technical perspective, it still feels very beta, and I wouldn't put critical communications on it. However, it's a fun introduction to LoRa and long range low power RF, and can be a fun way to communicate much like I think amateur radio was to its early adopters.
I think one thing that causes a lot of community strangeness is the strong push by some to make it what it's not, like some doomsday-proof communication system that will outlive cellular networks and atomic bombs. It could be useful but requires skilled operators and coordination to work well (like using different frequencies and coding at events for much more bandwidth).
I saw some twitter-like shit comments on chi-mesh while visiting family in IL.
But I've seen nothing but friendly interactions on the SF bay mesh which is much larger and thriving.
Nothing seemed particularly toxic, not on either of these meshes. Considering it's an open system anyone can say anything on, I'm sure it'll devolve into chaos as it gets more popular.
But when it comes to toxicity I'm going to assume you're either referring to the Discord, or making shit up. Discord having its roots in gamers is known to be a dumpster fire and I expect nothing less than toxic behavior on any Discord "server".
I do not understand why people spend time on Discord to play with Meshtastic though. Play with the mesh, that's the whole point.
They're looking at ways to have regular nodes repeat on the network. Right now it's a one line change to enable it. Doing it well and smart is what's holding it back
In case you didn't know what Meshtastic [0] is: Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure.
Pretty cool. I wish Meshtastic had more focus on routing and a way to safely do store & fwd. It’s difficult to actually mesh well with it. I run a few solar powered higher altitude nodes and provide reasonable coverage but I’ve observed many messages never reach their destination.
Looking at their GitHub there are some things upcomming
- They want to make device telemetry opt-in. This will cause the network to be more quiet
- A few patches ended up in master for handling corner cases of their flooding and next-hop routing algorithm
- There's also a merge request ("Add packet replay feature") which maybe can solve the reliability problem
Currently bigger Meshtastic networks are very very unreliable. I almost cannot traceroute a device that is one or two hops away. And our channels are not very saturated (10-20% ChUtil).
It would not. We would need to make a case to add Meshtastic. Amateur radio has had a much better chance since the days of the Space Shuttle. Astronauts routinely make ISS to Earth contacts with amateur radio operators. There is also ARISS.
Correct. Developed by the late Bob Bruninga. I had many email exchanges with Bob and we were able to send SSTV images through his NO-* series of amateur radio satellites with some technical advice a few years ago.
APRS is much more extensive and even available via commercial ham radio
Hey it was great meeting you and talking! So nice of you to stop and chat while you were carrying around that supper big iMac - LOL! Hope you come back to the show next year too.
Oh man, I have all my retro consoles, but the C64 and 128 were the only gear my parents sold out from under me. I should be happy it’s not taking up space in a closet but stuff like this makes me miss it dearly.
I built a Meshtastic and found a few nodes but made 0 contacts. Gave up after a few weeks. The community seems to be more interested in talking about it and showing pictures of their gear as opposed to actually doing anything with it.
This is my project. I’ve only built 915MHz ones since I’m in the USA but I could provide 868 too. Thanks, I should note this! BASIC works well for parsing strings, printing to the screen, and using the Kernal serial routines. I do have some ideas of helper code using assembly that may get added, but plan to keep the main code BASIC.
Finally got to meet Adrian at VCF Midwest, as I've gone down the retro rabbit hole his videos are a great reference. And he and others have built up some invaluable tools to diagnose and fix quirks on these old systems.
Would like to figure out Meshtastic on the Apple II as well!
At time of writing (2025-09-27, plus or minus a timezone), there does not appear to be any serious attempt to secure application-layer message contents. (At least, not yet)
My hope is that this cool new radio link option will still gain traction and grow and develop without painting itself into a corner, security-wise.
To wit- security hints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model have improved substantially since my last readthrough.
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