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Comment by simonjgreen | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool. I wish Meshtastic had more focus on routing and a way to safely do store & fwd. It’s difficult to actually mesh well with it. I run a few solar powered higher altitude nodes and provide reasonable coverage but I’ve observed many messages never reach their destination.

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Looking at their GitHub there are some things upcomming

- 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).

Checkout MeshCore, it has the concept of a room server which is a private store and forward server. Also see this https://github.com/mikecarper/meshfirmware/blob/main/MeshCor...

This. I like the idea of Meshtastic however APRS is much more extensive and even has satellite coverage like the ISS.

It would work a Meshtastic repeater from the ISS?

LoRa is extremely robust and can work with super weak signals. At the price of being very very slow in the most reliable configuration .

That combination is toxic for a high amount of parallel users.

I think it would need big modifications: fast uplink and robust slow downlink.

It would not. We would need to make a case to add Meshtastic. Amateur radio has had a much better chance since the days of the Space Shuttle. Astronauts routinely make ISS to Earth contacts with amateur radio operators. There is also ARISS.

5w ISS contacts are hard enough as it is

APRS requires a license right?

Correct. Developed by the late Bob Bruninga. I had many email exchanges with Bob and we were able to send SSTV images through his NO-* series of amateur radio satellites with some technical advice a few years ago.

APRS is much more extensive and even available via commercial ham radio

That's kind of the benefit of LoRa though. Cheap unlicensed radio that works surprisingly well for what it is.

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