I shall soon be getting a Rak WisMesh Tag and currently have a Heltec MeshPocket 10,000 mAh that is currently set up as a mesh core companion. I know for a fact that there is some minimal meshtastic activity in my area and there is no meshcore activity in my area at all yet.
The way I see it, I have two options:
- Put the tag on Meshtastic and have one foot in both camps.
- Setup the MeshPocket as a repeater so it can auto zero hop advert once every three hours, or the equivalent of eight times per day, to let anybody passing through know that there’s at least somebody here and use the tag as my companion node instead.
My personal opinion is that I like mesh core better, even though there’s no activity in my area yet.
The difficulty with meshcore that I see, is unless there are some seriously dedicated local HAM’s who are willing to risk life and limb to run routers in optimal locations, it has no real benefits over Meshtastic without dedicated infrastructure. Sire it has a normal mesh only mode now, but only if people select it.
Meshtastic still seems to have better overall market adoption so I would prefer to use it in low density areas.
That’s the good thing about meshcore though. Even in 3-byte ID mode, you can still get 16 hops, so you don’t need repeaters in as optimal of places as you would with meshtastic.
It’s certainly better to have them in optimal places if you can, but if you can’t then you can just put a repeater up on a flagpole at your house and it’s still okay.
No life or limb risk necessary to bring it down from a 30-foot pole if needed.
