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two issues with the thing. it necessitates buying shit, however inexpensive; woulda preferred repurposing existing hardware. and, it’s got practically no privacy baked in as it’s constantly blasting out your hardware ID; at least such was the state last time I took a look. the mentioned alternatives look good, I’ll check those out.
I’ve tried both side by side, ultimately you can tune out Meshtastic to cover a metro area pretty well. Mesh core is better at linking regions together, but ultimately it’s not fully open source. Like you gotta buy some firmwares.
My local area, and many others have active contributors to Meshtastic apps and firmware, I feel more comfort in that than reaching people in the next state over.
What is the furthest you’ve connected to on Meshtastic? I’ve yet to buy hardware, but I see a lot of complaints on the Meshtastic subreddit about range and low activity. On the other hand I’ve watched a couple videos about big Meshcore groups, connectivity from Vancouver to Oregon, stuff like that.
The furthest node I can reliably hit on Meshtastic is about 60 miles from me. Sporadically there’s a node I see 110 miles away.
With Meshcore I can sporadically hit something 300 miles away, but locally isn’t reliable because the density isn’t as good in my area. Too many dead spots.
Ultimately I’m going to use both, but I’m not putting up any meshcore infrastructure because it’s not FOSS and Meshtastic has more inertia here.
Buy two devices and flash both. See what your locals are doing.
Have you checked if your local area is on another channel besides the default LongFast?
https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/local-groups/
For my area, most of Northern Georgia/Atlanta is on MediumFast and there’s a good bit of nodes and participation on that.
Yeah, I have a lot of fun with Meshtastic.
There’s hundreds and hundreds of nodes across my region, I can talk to other cities, which is fun :-D
I love seeing how far I can make a direct connection too, surprising the crazy range on these little guys if they’re up high enough!
I have a T-Deck with me right now. I send messages into the void occasionally. No one’s picked up on one yet.
I’m hosting a seeed solar node pro at home, and I carry either a t-echo or a t-1000-e with me daily. I also grabbed a t-deck pro to play with. It’s been a blast learning about the setups and I keep thinking about stealth deploying a couple more solar nodes to build out the network in the area around me.
