How to Master the Mesh - EP1 Meshtastic Routing

[@billrobertson]

I always love a sense of humor tossed randomly in a technical presentation. Yout "Takeaways" list got me to subscribe, even though I'm is the US! Thanks very much for explaining yet another facet of Meshtastic.

[@EricSolomon-op8ti]

VERY !!! Helpful. Just beginning my Mesh journey. Thank You You continue to be an incredible source for me. 73

[@andykirby]

🙏🏻😁👍🏻

[@lua-nya]

Ooh, looking forth to the next stop in this journey filled with mesh!

[@Z-J-]

Thank you for taking time to upload this 🍻 just when I think I’m figuring it out, I realize how lost I am 😂

[@andykirby]

😁🙏🏻

[@dsldsl1980]

This was super helpful for the mesh i am working to setup in Arizona. I will be make some updates soon. Thank you!

[@dmaynor]

I subscribed the second you admitted about click bait. It takes guts to admit it even though I think good content (like yors( doesn't need it. I felt like you were building audience trust and honesty and accuracy of my two favorite traits in s YTer.

[@tjeerdbersma4482]

Thanks for the basics, now going to #2. (just starting with Meshtastic from Holland).

[@mistermarkdavis]

I’m American and am doing my best to understand the instructions in English. I love the channel, even with the language gap.

[@SaltMineRanch]

Me likey too. MURICA! Thanks for the breakdown. Sounds like the protocol could do with some work. I think I could hijack this with no effort and do all manner of bad things, so I assume a simply misbehaving device could too inadvertently. Needs more robustness, and picatinny rails.

[@Lylevp1]

Thank you so so much for clarification on this! More help on what mode to use would be amazing! Thank you subscribed and liked.

[@MakeDoAndMend1]

Hi Andy. I have just started messing about with directional aerials for 868mhz using stuff from Charity Shops etc. It may work but difficult to test. Cheers from George and Jane

[@IndependentNewsMedia]

Nice overview video, God bless.

[@johnmilner0859]

Good video explanation 👍🏻

[@kc8pnd]

Andy, perhaps there should be a "bake in" time that sits and listens for x amount of time that looks at other nodes and its own position AND hight and calculates if the node should be a router. I am in a development stage of making a system for our town, often struggle with what should be a router or not.

[@m7trsradio]

Great work and update. All three of mine are set to client-retirerd as they are all in a draw lol. I managed to find one node near me. Which was on and off just like mine probably due to charging. Lol Great video 73

[@andykirby]

🤣

[@Androctonus84]

Love the new series. I've heard you and others mention that there is a problem having too many routers in a mesh. I assume that because they have priority the way they do, messages could just get stuck bouncing between routers and never reach a client node. I'm just wondering, because I can see about 40 nodes from my house, but about a dozen of them are set to router, which seems excessive. In particular, more than half of these appear to belong to one entity who has routers all around the county, including one on MQTT. There seems to be very little traffic on the network, but I'm wondering if it isn't because this mess of routers all in a relatively small area (the terrain here is VERY flat, so I would expect that 3 or 4 could more than cover the whole county) are just trapping a lot of messages.

[@Woddy-bd7ns]

Andy?

[@mestora70]

Every client will eventually rebroadcast a message (as long as there is hop count remaining) if it does not hear three other radios rebroadcast first. The time a client waits and listens is inversely proportional to signal strength of the received message. This is how the furthest nodes usually get to do the rebroadcasting. A router or repeater follows its own rules and blasts out everything. The only use case for a router or repeater is to connect two or more isolated sub-meshes. If a client on a mountain were to hear 3 rebroadcasts from one side of a mountain it would never re-broadcast and the other mesh on the other side of the mountain would not get the message. Routers and Repeaters degrade mesh performance by shortening hops and adding congestion. They should only be used if they bring in other clients which have no other way of joining. People by nature want to contribute and "help" the mesh by running a router or repeater and don't realize they are actually degrading the mesh. Many think being on a hill is reason enough to be a router. It is not, you should be I'm a great position AND connect isolated nodes. Just being high, even very high, is not a justification to be a router or repeater.

[@mestora70]

I am in a large node stretching from the Phoenix, Arizona to Tucson Arizona containing about 140-150 visible nodes and many of hidden nodes including trackers and sensors--I rebroadcast telemetry every 8 seconds or so on average. Meshtastic is especially popular in Mesa and Tucson. There is an active chapter of R U Prepared in Mesa Arizona and many of the hams are on board with Meshtastic. I also suspect there is a Mormon/prepping correlation leading so so many nodes in Mesa. We have many gratuitous routers that shorten hops and I gradually increased my hop count to 7 seeing many nodes on 6 hops (northern Tucson) and a few on 7 (SE Tucson). My channel utilization is >30% and my Tx can be as high as 3+%. In the US where there is no duty cycle limit, gratuitous routers' biggest impact is shortening hops. In a duty cycle limited jurisdiction, congestion would also be a big factor from gratuitous routers and a hop limit workaround would only make matters worse. I have a router 2 miles away set to ignore but that only prevents me from rebroadcasting him not him stealing my first hop. He has a Heltec V3 while I have a Station G2 set to 1000mW (legal limit in US) and an 8dBi antenna. I have been doing my best to educate locals but sometimes I want to break out torches and pitchforks. I would like to see the developers address the hop eating problem by making routers and repeaters broadcast last, not first, at least in duty cycle unlimited jurisdictions, of course this would only work if people updated firmware. Most of these gratuitous routers are router_clients (which are nerfed in 2.3.15 or higher).

[@MihaiVoicuMihvoi]

I think your explanation is more accurate. This was my understanding too, all are hearing and the one who gets the lowest signal is transmitting first. The one who receives a retransmit is not retransmiting. That's why nodes in the house should be CLIENT_MUTE, to not inhibit close nodes to retransmit. I thought ROUTER only has faster retransmit delay, not always retransmit. Am I wrong?

[@bluenetmarketing]

It would help to be able to create a private cluster of nodes that uses the mesh and that ignores and is ignored by all nodes not identified as part of that particular private cluster of nodes.

[@nathanjones2584]

You can do that…

[@bluenetmarketing]

@@nathanjones2584 Oh. I see.

[@mestora70]

You could tweak the LoRa parameters or just run the default or LongFast on a different frequency slot. However you are better off just using LingFast with a different encryption key and other modes will still forward your messages without being able to decrypt them.

[@bluenetmarketing]

@@mestora70 Thanks. There are more options to juggle and accomplish my goal than I am aware of. I need to do more reading.

[@Woddy-bd7ns]

@blue use a unique channel with 256 encryption

[@slipperyslope3912]

Questions: 1) Is msg content visible to relaying nodes? Or is it obscured/encrypted? 2) Are msgs blasted to all nodes in range? Or can the final destination node be selected (even if that node isn't visible directly, IE needs to hop).

[@Woddy-bd7ns]

You can choose to encryption

[@jonjohnson2844]

I wonder if meshtastic could introduce something like a 'master node/relay' system where volunteers run servers that hold messages which keep reattempting for x times until successful delivery...I don't know I'm just thinking out loud, my background is in IP, only recently started messing around in SDR.

[@MKUMBRA]

the takeaways made me laugh out loud

[@chublez]

Great info!

[@jamess1787]

Bean Fries Supreme, hold the chives. Make that 2 orders please, with a twister wrap

[@Jim_2E0HKM]

I've had my outdoor node setup for just over a month, I'm in a rural location but it can receive over 100 nodes all over the place as we're just under 200m high here, yet other than with the other small nodes in the house I've never managed to have a message exchange with anyone? I receive the odd few but never get a response back? It's a shame Meshtastic can't simultaneously listen to long slow mode as well as long fast as that might help a slower yet more reliable messages in rural locations. I'm not sure where to go with it now. I've got plans for 2 other nodes here with great take off north & south to hopefully join Crewe & maybe Manchester and the other which overlooks the south & into Birmingham, but basically just hoping for some message exchange with some more local nodes but no doing at the moment.

[@Andyschannel-ph9sw]

Hi Andy, hope you're well. Can you supply a complete ready to run Meshtastic? 2E0BGB, I'm in Cockfosters. Thank you. Andre....

[@willemhaifetz-chen1588]

Yep now I understand.

[@armisis]

Still haven't found a one up here in north Yorkshire in range.

[@14percentviking]

I have a heltec v3. I have flashed it. I'm in the UK. I asked for help on your discord, and I got one reply. Is the whole meshtastic thing full of gatekeepers? or is it just me that feels lost? I've flashed it and connected it via Bluetooth to my phone.

[@bodstrup]

I thought Meshtastic reliedcon broadcast - Each node blindly re-transmitting a raceivrd packet until hop count is 0 Are you saying that transmissions are actually targeted and received/processed by the destination node only ? If yes - then a routing table must be distributed, so Node 1 knows it has to go through node 4 to reach node 3

[@TheCasualDrinker]

@andy kirby Hi Andy im trying to link the isles of scilly to mainland uk (lands end) aprox 32 miles. Straight line across the sea. Do you have any advice ?

[@mrhaftbar]

Router mode should only be used when you are in a good spot for repeating messages. Otherwise it will degrade the network mesh.

[@gartmorn]

Could users be encouraged to incorporate the first half of their postcode into their client name? This would make it easy to identify the location of signal (providing they are not mobile)!

[@Tom-jd1rm]

So if I have two nodes in my house that I want to share messages on wifi, the same network, should they be set to client mute? Will they see each other and messages?

[@Seikatsu121]

How about each node gets a score based on how many nodes it can reach and the routing preferres nodes with higher scores?

[@andykirby]

Good idea 👍🏻

[@bolle666]

Would be awesome if the nodes could negotiate their roles with each other somehow.

[@jaredneaves7007]

It will probably have to be that way in the future. Trusting end users to self govern doesn't always work even though we wish it would

[@BrotherBloat]

But isn't each transmission a broadcast to all on the same primary channel? At what point is this algorithm of preferring the lower RSSI applied?

[@GUVWAF]

Yes, indeed. Only when multiple nodes are receiving a packet at the same time, a node with worse SNR will rebroadcast earlier.

[@andykirby]

Hey @GUVWAF Hopefully I got most of this right? Still learning!

[@rustyhaddock7954]

​@@GUVWAFSo, there's an SNR-dependent delay before a node rebroadcasts a packet? The lower the SNR of the received packet the quicker the turnaround time to rebroadcasts?

[@GUVWAF]

@@rustyhaddock7954 Indeed, and nodes in ROUTER/REPEATER role will get priority above that, see also the documentation. @andykirby Yes, I think most of it is right except indeed that Meshtastic doesn't "choose" which node will receive first, it only determines who rebroadcasts first when multiple receive the same packet.

[@andykirby]

Yeah when I watched it through a final time I did think that it might have sounded like that😁

[@armisis]

Ok need to get my solar up and in router mode.

[@mestora70]

99% chance you should not be a router.

[@markwilliams5654]

I guess it would get better with time

[@iclmb510]

I’ve been participating in Meshtastic in Utah, US for about 9 months. In our area we have hundreds of active nodes. We can say definitively that Meshtastic DOES NOT WORK for general purpose comms. Once the mesh is overloaded it becomes almost useless. I wish more “influencers” jumping on the bandwagon for clicks would mention this. It still has value for use in remote areas and I believe could be useful in a situation where traditional comms aren’t available at all but day to day, the more nodes there are, the worse it works. There is also no way to “fully control” a mesh when anyone can join. People join, get frustrated it doesn’t work and immediately set hops to 7 which makes the whole situation worse.

[@erayd]

It can (and does) work at larger scales IF the mesh is well coordinated and designed appropriately for the terrain and node distribution you're trying to serve. That is a big if... most meshes seem to be growing organically without that kind of organisation to mitigate the problems upfront, which makes them much harder to deal with later when things get congested.

[@michaelsorensen7914]

THIS! I couldn’t figure out why it was so spotty or unreliable, despite having hundreds of nodes all around-until I learned more about how it works. Disappointing, because in theory, having so many nodes all over the valley and mountain tops should make a system like this rock solid. Though I now understand why it may actually have backfired here in Utah…

[@Name-pw4lh]

Hi, on my opinion Meshtastic network is theoretically nice, but in practice I haven't seen much use for it in among anyone of the users. Most common usage case is when people build their own nodes and then communicate to those base nodes with their own mobile nodes. What is the purpose of communicate to your self? Everyone is comparing ranges and SWRs but why? What is the benefit of all this? I think Meshtastic network should be much more dense and there should be much less configurable parameters because too much parameters make the Mesh unreliable. One of the biggest Mesh destroyer is the MQTT. Why to relay messages via internet dependable MQTT when the whole initial purpose was to create off grid network. And one thing...The LoRa has PRACTICALLY only 2-4km radio range. It would be very nice to see how people do something USEFUL with the Meshtastic network.

[@johnscamera]

Try looking through the lens of a farmer with remote sensors on ther property and with a private MQTT server. The use-case becomes a little clearer in that context.

[@FNUKSTER1366]

Unfortunately the latest version, does not allow router mode 😢

[@andykirby]

It does allow router, just not router-client 👍🏻

[@wowcolors]

Isn’t router mode deprecated?

[@andykirby]

Router-client is not router

[@scotterdog1036]

Andy, you don't have enough HTs.

[@andykirby]

🤪

[@cskeise]

🩵👊😎

[@jaredneaves7007]

Lol takeaways

[@kg-Whatthehelliseventhat]

Hello, If anyone could help me put together 2 units using the Japanese frequency, i would really appreciate the guidance. Currently i am in a rather bad position and having the ability to communicate with others would be great. Usually, i am on the 7th floor but have access to the 10th floor observation deck. I just dont have the skills or equipment to put together much of anything, plus i might not get more than a few hours a day where my body lets me be productive. I would be glad to pay for the your time but my wife is the only provider until i go back to work, if i can go back to work... Thank you in advance. KG

[@TheNorville2]

Mate you lost me Meshtastic, I just cannot get my head around it, it is just not my thang.