I made a thing. Its a MT AND MC repeater. Ive been working on it for a while. It works really well for a unilateral Meshcore AND meshtastic repeater with only one antenna.

Now I just need to get the “hops” logic working and it can actually be used. It already has logic to NOT repeat any packet it hears more than 2x.

It switches between the two different protocols. And if it hears one, waits a tiny bit, making sure no other packets come in to confirm, then re-transmits the packet.

With this, a single heltek v3 can act as a repeater for both protocols.

Some things to work on:

  1. Chance of getting partial packets. If its switching really quick it might get only half a packet. It removes those. In theory if I make it wait on the same protocol for a bit longer, I can remove the amount of partial packets as both systems re-transmit the initial packet a couple of times. So if detected, just stay on the current one for a bit and wait for the next packet.
  2. At the moment it just re-transmits so no real “hops”…so im not going to share the code at this time. If I dont get that working, it could easily flood the network. Even though I do have dup logic built in, it really should know how to deal with hops.
  3. It only works on the heltek v3. Cause thats all I had around the house. RTLSDR confirms packets are being re-sent if registered. I confirmed both MT and MC packets are being sent over :)

Meshtastic is MUCH more chatty BTW. Its like 15/1 at the moment. Code is rough so ill be cleaning it up.

Ill be working on this and polishing it.

  • mesa@piefed.socialOP
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    21 days ago

    Honestly I dont know how putting more nodes up could ever hurt the network? I mean imagine ALL meshtastic and meshcore repeaters suddenly could do both. It would mean a 20/30% more coverage for meshtastic and like 1000% for meshcore right off the bat. (meshcore has less hardware running around than meshtastic).

    That being said im VERY new to developing anything on the heltec/meshtastic/meshcore stuff. So its all very alpha software.

    Once I get the hops working ill publish. Its not pretty. And I dont want to be the forever maintainer on this project, I got other things going on. But its a good forkable project right now.

    Thanks for the support!