Iirc @Juraj was deploying MeshCore?

This video decides it for me. Going with MeshCore.

Use whatever works in your area already.

I'm starting fresh

No rush.

I would say MeshCore, it's easier to make it work with less infrastructure. But you need high places with good visibility. Roofs of tallest buildings or hills. Get a solar+ battery node for repeaters. Forget about running it in your home, high up.

Ack. Have one solar node already. Just need to scout a high point.

If you are militant about open source, then meshtastic is the only way to go because the meshcore client applications are closed source and so is some of the firmware for different devices. I didn't touch it for over a year for that exact reason until an app called meshcore-open that fixes the bug of the other app being proprietary. I still have to watch out what firmware I use though, because as I said, some of it is still proprietary. Like, I think the TDeck firmware is proprietary.

High point can be top of a tree. Quite permissionless. Also this: View quoted note →

I use only community firmware, not really much into T-Deck personally. There's a lot of alternative open source firmware as well though. There's also

GitHub

GitHub - satsdisco/meshngr: Beautiful mesh messaging for MeshCore LoRa radios. Off-grid. Encrypted. No internet required.

Beautiful mesh messaging for MeshCore LoRa radios. Off-grid. Encrypted. No internet required. - satsdisco/meshngr

by @Grafton @ Vexl

Good insight. And I won’t flash if I can’t build it

Oh, I will have to check that out. I was only aware of the official proprietary crapp and meshcore-open.

Good. Compromise is not an option. Open source or die.

Me too, and I hated it and that’s why I started playing around and made meshngr it’s Alpha currently and this is my first release so please check it out. Would love to hear what you think and how we can keep making it better.

I feel like I need to clarify my position a little bit. I'm actually in no way against meshcore, and from what little I have used meshcore open, I actually think it does some things way better than meshtastic, that they could definitely learn from. The two biggest things right now that come to mind are 1. Mesh core companions don't relay messages except in that new outdoors mode, which takes them off of the standard mesh and puts them all together on a separate frequency. Makes total sense to me. Though I can see where meshtastic is coming from, making every client also repeat messages, I would think a better option would be for a compromise, where meshtastic would do a 50-50 split, when you very first created the node, and it would choose a 0 or 1, and if it was set to 0, it would be client mute, and if it was set to 1, it would be a client, and therefore, re- so you'd have the best of both worlds, and if it was set to 1, it would be a client, and therefore, re-lay messages, so you'd have the best of both worlds. 2. The region scopes seem like pure gold to keep area specific chatter in that area and reduce congestion on the wider mesh outside that area. This is a feature that I absolutely think meshtastic should adopt in some way.

There's a lot of development, most of it FOSS happening on MeshCore. It is inevitable, because proprietary doesn't get the patches from the vibecoders 😉 So FOSS will be way better.

There aren't any other mesh core nodes in my area, and the only reason I even tried mesh core open was to see if there were, and because at the time I had two LORA radios, and I gave one of them away so I only have one now. With that said, at some point in the future, I will be flashing my node back to meshcore and will definitely give your application a look at that time. One thing to be aware of is that I am a blind user and therefore require a screen reader. So, if any of your buttons are unlabeled, I will definitely be telling you about it. You might want to take a look at meshcore-open to see if you need help with labeling your buttons because they seem to do a really good job at it.

Yeah, I don't know what the hell they were thinking having YouTube influencers like Andy pushing a proprietary app. That has completely tainted my view of meshcore and only now that I see that there are some open source apps am I beginning to finally come away from that?

I did think of a question. In the recent versions, meshcore added an outdoor functionality where you could run companions as temporary repeaters if you didn't have any infrastructure. Well, we don't have any infrastructure in my city, and so I was wondering if meshngr exposes that new function yet. I know that meshcore-open does not.

No idea, have not tried it.

I was surprised about companion nodes not repeating, but I came to understand why. I was running a repeater and the community gently told me to just turn it off. You can cover the whole city with three repeaters. There are more than three of course, but I was basically not helping anything, I was taking precious airtime. The repeater nodes are pretty cheap and you need to really think where you put them - as high up as possible, with the best visibility. Most users given this option would be like me "I want to help the network". But I was not really helping, I was just using airtime in an area that was perfectly covered.

I was surprised about companion nodes not repeating, but I came to understand why. I was running a repeater and the community gently told me to just turn it off. You can cover the whole city with three repeaters. There are more than three of course, but I was basically not helping anything, I was taking precious airtime. The repeater nodes are pretty cheap and you need to really think where you put them - as high up as possible, with the best visibility. Most users given this option would be like me "I want to help the network". But I was not really helping, I was just using airtime in an area that was perfectly covered.I was surprised about companion nodes not repeating, but I came to understand why. I was running a repeater and the community gently told me to just turn it off. You can cover the whole city with three repeaters. There are more than three of course, but I was basically not helping anything, I was taking precious airtime. The repeater nodes are pretty cheap and you need to really think where you put them - as high up as possible, with the best visibility. Most users given this option would be like me "I want to help the network". But I was not really helping, I was just using airtime in an area that was perfectly covered.

I'm assuming that was on mesh core because on meshtastic they definitely say you should not use router mode or repeater mode unless you have access to an extremely high tower or a mountaintop. I always tell people that you shouldn't run a router unless you are at least 100 feet above the ground and even then you should probably talk with the community in your area to make sure that it would make sense. 100 feet or above should be router if it makes sense. Anything less than 100 feet but above 20 feet should be client and anything below 20 feet should be client mute because they're not going to get you very much more range. And so it's kind of pointless to have them be repeating messages at all.