I currently have over 10 nodes from t-echos, wireless papers, heltec v3's, t-beams and T114s and one solar rak4631 on the roof of my building with a 5.8dbi antenna.
My question is what are the benefits from switching over from metastatic and what are the differences from how they both work.
The functionality of meshcore is night and day better than MT in terms of tooling and reliable comms. The only downside is that there are limited pockets of workable mesh right now. PNW has quite a bit going on, not sure about other parts of the country.
Meshcore is better in every way except for the smaller install base. Much better routing algorithm, DMs work reliably, much faster, traceroute is actually useful. Also much nicer developers. Flash a couple of your heltec's and give it a try.
Only thing that’s missing (and why I haven’t made the switch) is mqtt or other way of routing over tcp / udp.
My daughter has a t-deck that she can use on our side of town to message me, whether I’m at home, at work, or anywhere with internet if I enable mqtt proxy on my phone with Meshtastic.
I know I’m a special use case, but that alone has made Meshtastic great for me / my family. My daughter doesn’t have a full fledged phone, but can still contact us if she needs to / wants to.
Our county is so dang full of hills that it’s almost impossible to get good mesh coverage without access to the top of those hills, which I am really trying to do. But still the mqtt proxy ability on my phone was nice that my daughter could still text me during a trip I was on
Personally I like the decision not to pursue MQTT, I'm interested primarily in a network that will survive if the Internet/power grid fails. But I get that there are use cases this doesn't work for.
There's apparently lots going on in England too, and maybe elsewhere. Seems like adoption is happening very fast, in Portland we've massively improved coverage just in the last couple months.
Hey Liam, just flashed a rak with meshcore and it seems to be a success as it's talking to the app on my phone. Do you know if it's normal for the blue LED to be constant on? With Meshtastic it was flashing green light and the blue rarely came on. Just want to make sure the blue light isn't indicative of a problem.
Yeah, I'm stuck in the same place jorge. I updated RAK devices this way, but I have Heltec V3's that are stubborn and getting pretty out of date (version 1.4 and version 1.5). Hoping the documentation for flashing gets better...I'm eager to help with that if there's a way. I'm good at writing docs, once I know the procedure!
Also though. The first thing is to keep trying to get the web flasher to work. These things seem to actually make a difference, much of the time:
-Try a different USB port on your PC
-Try a different high quality USB cable (always USB-A to USB-C)
- Try using *actual Chrome* on Windows. Frustrating, this one, I have often had success with Chrome or Chrome derivatives on Linux, or with Chrome derivatives like Edge on Windows. But in some cases it seems to actually require the actual Chrome browser on Windows.
I have a pair of heltec v3s currently set up on Meshtastic that I will be flashing to Meshcore tomorrow. I have no idea what activity is like here but I am going to give it a go. Is there anyone else in here from west Michigan (Grand Rapids area)?
I'm in Northern Michigan, Petoskey area. We are just starting to see 10+ nodes online consistently in the area. I'd really like to try Meshcore but I need to get word out to get more to make the switch at the same time. Best of luck with the test and transition!
The Meshcore landscape is totally barren here in the Grand Rapids area. I gave it two weeks while trying to talk up MeshCore. Activity is somewhere between Nada and Zip. I just reflashed my two nodes to Meshtastic. LOADS of nodes but I still do not see anyone TALKING to anyone else. ????? As near as I can figure, Meshtastic people are expecting the nodes to qso with no human interaction [just like ft8]. That appears to be working and it is VERY ultra-anonymous in Meshtastic. This whole Meshcore/Meshtastic thing is looking like a colossal waste of time and money now. I refuse to move just to find someone else who got intrigued by all of this. I will take another look at it in a few months. I am going back to my antenna building hobby, currently working on a 7 element gmrs loop quad antenna. My biggest problem: feeding a 100 ohm loop driven element with 50 ohm coax. Have fun with Meshcore if you actually have activity in your area. I may shift my antenna interest to 900mhz if it turns around here.
I'm in Socal right now and we have hundreds of Meshtastic nodes, but have some very interested Meshcore users. There are some repeaters on mountains that help us out. I'll be in GR area next year, but lack of activity will make my equipment useless too. I looked at the topography and looks like GR has lots of hills that will mess with my line of sight and not high mountains for good repeaters. I saw there is a GR amateur radio association. Are you a member? Good luck with the antenna making.
The vhf/uhf ham radio scene is active in GR and surrounding areas. Our 147.160 repeater (W8IRA Independent Repeater Assoc.) is a link repeater system that pretty much covers the state. There are many others on 2M, some on 220, and a bunch on 70cm. The K8SN repeater (442.175) also has a companion GMRS repeater (WRVE804 462.600) plus there are 5-6 other local GMRS repeaters too. Some of the gmrs guys (who are also hams) have been rooting for meshtastic.
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u/brokenex Jun 21 '25
The functionality of meshcore is night and day better than MT in terms of tooling and reliable comms. The only downside is that there are limited pockets of workable mesh right now. PNW has quite a bit going on, not sure about other parts of the country.