We also respect and forward Meshtastic and DisasterRadio packets, but there is currently no reciprocity. What can be done about it?
At time of writing (2025-09-27, plus or minus a timezone), there does not appear to be any serious attempt to secure application-layer message contents. (At least, not yet)
My hope is that this cool new radio link option will still gain traction and grow and develop without painting itself into a corner, security-wise.
To wit- security hints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model have improved substantially since my last readthrough.
They are quite possibly one of the most toxic projects right now.
Could you elaborate?
I've only personally tested Meshtastic, and from a technical perspective, it still feels very beta, and I wouldn't put critical communications on it. However, it's a fun introduction to LoRa and long range low power RF, and can be a fun way to communicate much like I think amateur radio was to its early adopters.
I think one thing that causes a lot of community strangeness is the strong push by some to make it what it's not, like some doomsday-proof communication system that will outlive cellular networks and atomic bombs. It could be useful but requires skilled operators and coordination to work well (like using different frequencies and coding at events for much more bandwidth).
Meshcore is MIT licensed. And closed source applications already started to creep in. See the smartphone apps and the T-Echo implementation. This has already the classic smell of ham radio projects I honestly don't want to support.
The maintainers of MT are friendly. The people using it - not all of them. Like all community driven projects.
But I've seen nothing but friendly interactions on the SF bay mesh which is much larger and thriving.
Nothing seemed particularly toxic, not on either of these meshes. Considering it's an open system anyone can say anything on, I'm sure it'll devolve into chaos as it gets more popular.
But when it comes to toxicity I'm going to assume you're either referring to the Discord, or making shit up. Discord having its roots in gamers is known to be a dumpster fire and I expect nothing less than toxic behavior on any Discord "server".
I do not understand why people spend time on Discord to play with Meshtastic though. Play with the mesh, that's the whole point.
Is there an assembly application planned or will it be basic for now?
Or 169MHz if meshtastic supports it? Edit: Seems no, sadge.
If you add EU freq. I will buy!
Would like to figure out Meshtastic on the Apple II as well!
It’s like a way less fun ham radio.
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simonjgreen•4mo ago
NoiseBert69•4mo ago
- They want to make device telemetry opt-in. This will cause the network to be more quiet
- A few patches ended up in master for handling corner cases of their flooding and next-hop routing algorithm
- There's also a merge request ("Add packet replay feature") which maybe can solve the reliability problem
Currently bigger Meshtastic networks are very very unreliable. I almost cannot traceroute a device that is one or two hops away. And our channels are not very saturated (10-20% ChUtil).
firesteelrain•4mo ago
rfmoz•4mo ago
NoiseBert69•4mo ago
That combination is toxic for a high amount of parallel users.
I think it would need big modifications: fast uplink and robust slow downlink.
firesteelrain•4mo ago
5w ISS contacts are hard enough as it is
Gigachad•4mo ago
firesteelrain•4mo ago
APRS is much more extensive and even available via commercial ham radio
Gigachad•4mo ago
mikeytown2•4mo ago