I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.

Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!

This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.

Set up solar nodes last weekend. 200 miles of range now. Nerds, mad ideas. Good times.

After seeing the Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467 I wonder if they would pair well with Reticulum

>To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post.

Yeah, that's the general feel I get every time I poke into Mesh*. Neat radio tech, fun toy to find other nearby nerds, instantly-obvious problems that are fatal to growing beyond being that toy (or small specialized personal nets, where it's totally fine). They feel more like a tech demo than anything actually intended to survive.

Which is fine, you kinda need that to start out, and they do work today. Just... hard to get excited about.

Saw this at https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-net... and thought it was interesting

In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks.

More of everything, of course! But I'm far more interested in making the wifi we have more ad-hoc capable, more useful anywhere any time, for whatever, especially on the longer range bands like 900MHz.