Great, fun topic!
I've been experimenting with meshtastic and meshcore for the better part of
six months, including putting up my own meshcore repeater (and subsequently
having to rework it due to bad sealant allowing water ingress, but v3.0 is
going up soon).
For reference, my location is about halfway between Apex and Garner, just
north of Fuquay and Holly Springs in Wake County. Just north of the
southern edge of 540.
Meshtastic is great for ad-hoc, smallish dedicated group comms. Think
hiking group, camping group, etc. It has a very easy learning curve. When I
first flashed meshtastic, I immediately saw and was able to communicate
with a human who had two nodes not very far (.5 miles or so) from me.
meshcore is far better for established and scalable comms. When I first
flashed meshcore, I was able to receive messages from as far away as
Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia, by virtue of an established network of
stationary repeaters. I was receiving line-of-sight signal from as far away
as North Hills mall (12 miles from me, there's a repeater on The Eastern
building) and Chapel Hill ("Tarheel backhaul" repeater,
https://rdumesh.org/tarheel-backhaul-how-chapel-hill-joined-the-mesh/) as
they are high enough to have direct line of sight to my location, and are
running at legal limit (1 watt). They couldn't hear me at first because my
nodes (heltec v3, heltec t114) were running much less power, my antennas
are crap, and probably most importantly, not high enough.
Meshcore feels a little better engineered. Meshtastic feels more like a
toy, or proof of concept.
My guidance for success is:
1. Run meshcore on a repeater up high and some companion nodes inside your
house (within bluetooth range of your phone).
2. Deploy your repeater with 1 watt output and
3. Get the repeater as high as possible. With the low power firmware, solar
repeaters are trivially possible. Mine has a spot 80 feet up in a tree on
the back edge of my property.
If you're going to flash meshcore, especially on the ESP32 based devices,
be sure to use the power-saving fork of the firmware.
https://github.com/IoTThinks/EasySkyMesh/
The developer is VERY active and responsive, and works with the original
maintainers to roll changes upstream early and often.
Thanks,
Josh
On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 2:57 PM Pete Soper via TriEmbed <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Congrats, Glenn! Your raising this subject on Monday created a hell of a
> spark of interest.
>
> Pete
>
> On 8/12/26 13:45, Glen Smith via TriEmbed wrote:
> > As with all things, the documentation may not be up to date.
> >
> > I have the meshtastic app on my phone and prior to flashing my boards,
> > did discover a node. I don't remember now where I was at the time though.
> >
> > I have now flashed my 2 nodes and can report that I have sent messages
> > between them.
> >
> > Keep in mind that we can use this withing our own homes to report
> > telemetry - like Paul's freezer temp even if there is no other
> > infrastructure existent. If we find it useful, adding a routing /
> > repeater node would benefit the community and improve functionality
> > for everyone.
> >
> > A app called Flaresat seems to allow you to bridge to the internet via
> > a single phone that still has mobile connection. I have not
> > experimented with this yet.
> >
>
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