I reproduced your results with Meshcore here with the v4 sitting next to
me (antenna horizontal). I'd set it up, got caught up in the 1957 Rodan
movie (funny!) and when I brought the app up again there were 13
contacts going as far as Kentucky and Atlanta. Very surprising. After
another hour the contact total was 45 reaching to Nashville. Tarheel
Backhaul is listed as "direct". It's close to the UNC hospital. Color me
flabbergasted. That's 23 miles away, over the horizon. Using the line of
sight tool in the Meshcore app shows 120db of path loss between here and
there, ignoring the uncountable trees in the way. How can this be
happening?
And I have the antenna vertical now and four feet above the floor, taped
to a bay window. Maybe ready for moon bounce now.
Pete
Aug 16, 2026 3:29:49 PM jonathan hunsberger via TriEmbed
<[email protected]>:
Thanks all. This has been very interesting. I ordered a Heltec V4
from Amazon. Somehow it arrived about 18 hours later. I hooked it
up, flashed the standard meshcore.io <http://meshcore.io> firmware
and was immediately able to ping Tarheel Backhaul and get traffic
from Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, etc. with it lying on my desk. I
hung it up in the window and couldn't ping anything. Then i realized
that the antenna was pointing horizontally so i made it vertical and
got ping back!
It's plugged in, and if I leave the house and come back (or just
kill the app and restart/reconnect) i get all the contacts and
messages from when i was gone. Very easy to get started with if you
have a repeater in range! Anyway, i made a #triembed channel if
anyone wants to say hi on that.
Only bad thing is i might have to order another radio because i
wanted to try Meshtastic and now i don't want to turn this one off. :)
On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 4:38 PM Pete Soper via TriEmbed
<[email protected]> wrote:
Whoa, great bootstrap! Thanks again, Josh. Your performance
notes are very encouraging.
Pete
Aug 12, 2026 4:11:53 PM Josh Wyatt <[email protected]>:
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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