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
