• 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Lol, I’m the same way. Meshtastic is the hobby of the month and it’s been fun so far.

    Here a few reasons I’m liking it:

    • Learn more about radio frequencies
    • Off-grid communication, while hiking, camping, hunting etc
    • Communication and location updates in areas with poor cell service (concerts, music festivals, trave, boating, etc)
    • Emergency preparedness
    • In my area the broadcast channel is pretty active, so a community of like minded people to chat with
    • Fun little devices you get to burn money on (I have 4 pre-made and parts for 4 more I’ll make myself on the way)



    1. Semi, there are some network bridges that translate packets in to ones that the target network expects. Meshtastic has the “market share” in my area, and is completely FOSS, so I gravitate towards it. Reticulum seems very interesting but doesn’t have high adoption at this time.
    2. Yeah, I’m sure that some people do. Cell networks may also go down if overloaded during a natural disaster, but yes this is mostly a hobby.

    I’m planning on leaving a few nodes in advantageous locations near families work and home to ensure we can coordinate if cell goes down, and will get around to stashing a few away in a cage just in case



  • It’s designed to help weak/mobile/indoor nodes in poor radio locations, not routers. When you favorite routers or other strong nodes, your CLIENT_BASE aggressively rebroadcasts their traffic (acting as ROUTER), which can actually suppress better routing paths and add unnecessary congestion. The feature works best when you favorite only your personal handheld/EDC devices that need the boost from your strong base station. Favoriting already-strong infrastructure nodes defeats the purpose and can negatively impact overall mesh connectivity.

    This is entirely dependent on your mesh topology of course. In our larger mesh with a lot of routers in advantageous locations, a client base favoriting a router would do more harm than good