How exciting!
Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads.
Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215
I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.
I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.
To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.
"Thought experiments about mesh networking"
"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"
"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"
Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."
Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.
particularly the SDR stuff, which is the VAST majority of that section. this is not at all the same target audience as meshtastic:
>A computer with “sufficient” compute power and RAM, to run the ka9q-radio software. KA9Q has stated that a Raspberry Pi 4 is sufficient, and now we have the Raspberry Pi 5 with up to 16 GB of RAM, for only $120.
that's like suggesting the way to fix a wireless problem is to use a wire. otherwise the criticism seems to summarize as "it's slow and bad" and well. okay? that's hardly constructive, whether or not it's accurate.
the whole thing reads like "the solution is left as an exercise to the reader ;)" because it sounds like it's written by and for people who are already experts and just want to read a cathartic list of flaws they already know. and/or "buy better hardware lol". it's not at all the logical slam-dunk that you seem to think it is.
The more popular the network, the more frequent these message stomps happen. Flood routing makes these stomps more frequent.
There is also no end to end packet acknowledgement system like tcp, so at hop 3 (e.g.) if the message got stomped on, who would know?
Let's say someone made a dual band lora transceiver. Well that would help, but it wouldn't solve anything else, because there's still core routing/reliability/topology issues.
So if you had 20 channels to talk over, well that would be even better. The chance of having your message stomped on would go down significantly making the network much more reliable. That's the SDR part (the listening of 20 channels at once) vs the Lora chip which can only listen/transmit on 1 channel at once.
Edited to add:
"But that's super expensive hardware/engineering to do that!" you might say. Well, it's being done today.
The point is that if you can fit 20 1khz channels in a 20khz RF space. The 20khz RF can be converted into audio and fed into a soundcard and processed. This exists today with FT-8, though FT-8 uses 150hz bandwidth per stream in 2.8khz sections per band.
You can see some FT-8 activity by looking at some websdrs.
Maybe go here and tune to 14.074Mhz Upper Side Band (USB)
http://data3.caprockweather.com:8073/
Each vertical line is one message 150hz wide.
so there's one bit of probably-usable advice (slightly raise cost for significant benefits) and one that completely misses the point (charge at least 5-10x more for wildly different hardware, use hundreds of times more power, etc). the article spends several times more text on the latter.
flood routing and lack of end to end ack I also agree with, I sincerely doubt those are the best options and if user complaints are any sign then I think it's an existence proof that it doesn't scale, exactly as predicted. neither are part of that article, though it is in a linked also-large mastodon thread, which has basically just one constructive suggestion (8x the channels, though they don't think it'll work either) and many "this sucks" examples (flood fill, hop limit, etc. it amounts to "do better", not "X is better, learn from it").
So I think what's super interesting is that it not necessarily need to be 5-10x more, nor needs hundreds of times more power.
I'll start with the power argument first.
WSPR (pronounced "whisper") often uses 100mW transmissions and can be heard across the globe in the HF spectrum. The techniques for reception can pull the signal out of the noise. It's common for weather balloons to send telemetry this way. People use it to monitor band conditions as well.
The trick is that WSPR puts all the power into one signal approximately 6hz wide. That's why it's so efficient, and one reason why it can be heard across the globe with such low power. Now you're probably not going to get that distance in the 900Mhz ISM band, but you will be heard further if you so choose (or need to be).
As per cost?
100mW assuming a 75ohm antenna (dipole) is 36mA of current. For 1W (which is roughly the ISM limit) it's 115mA of current, so the components won't need to be high power, probably jelly bean parts.
The RTLSDR is $25 bucks with 2.4Mhz bandwidth which is way overkill for this.
Lots of microcontrollers are cheap.
There's engineering cost and time, sure, but Meshtastic did show that a need for reliable mesh low power messaging exists even if it's not the final form.
FT-8 doesn't seem usefully relevant here. The fact that the bandwidth is so low that it can be sampled with a sound card isn't at all helpful when Meshtastic doesn't require a PC. And FT-8 carries minimal payload (typically amounting to no more than the automated status updates you dislike Meshtastic wasting airtime on), and I've never heard of anyone doing routing over FT-8. You're just making noise about a completely unrelated niche radio hobby.
If the constraints of LoRa and Meshtastic don't make it possible to implement the kind of radio system you want to play with, that doesn't prove that Meshtastic has made any wrong decisions. It just says you would get a more fulfilling experience from getting into a different radio hobby, and stop getting in the way of potentially productive discussions about how Meshtastic could be improved within the constraints of the currently-existing commodity hardware.
This is what I meant about adding noise to the argument. This isn't a useful argument. FT8 could be decoded with a microcontroller. But you wouldn't know that. And it only shows your ignorance of the subject.
Meshtastic maximalists are the true believers, throwing away the decades of experience and knowledge because they drank the kool-aid of the leaders that think they are smarter than the folks who have been doing this for the last 40 years.
But those people aren't the experts typically. The experts have their own community, friendships, etc. They'll be super nice, and they might speak up, but they expect to have polite conversation. And if the forum is a shit show, they'll take their expertise elsewhere.
Let's say you have 100 meshtastic nodes in a residential valley. And you have 1 meshtastic repeater up on a mountain overlooking the valley (or it could be on a radio tower or water tower, say).
So it's clear that most of these nodes won't see each other because terrain, housing, trees, etc.
But it is possible that the repeater may have clear line of sight to most of them. And that's where the hidden node problem lies.
And adding more nodes and more repeaters is not going to help. The problem is either solved by increasing the number of channels (hence the sdr angle) or by time division multiplexing the single channel and coordinating who can talk at what time. The first is easy. The second is much harder.
In the article you linked, there are three paragraphs about Meshtastic in a 150-paragraph newsletter about several topics. The criticism seems to be that they they use digipeating, and then it refers to a Fedi thread[1] which is more coherent but still fairly vague. The upshot seems to be that flood routing doesn't scale, which is a fair criticism but feels disproportionate to the level of vitriol against the project.
The Fedi thread also adds that the Meshtastic founders were rude or unprofessional to him but doesn't cite any specifics or evidence.
I see this a lot with Meshtastic. People keep saying the founders are toxic and disrespectful of the community but it's always in these vague terms so I don't know what's driving it.
But specifically in this thread, I agree with sibling poster that you're being disrespectful and arguing ineffectively by pointing to such poor resources and then blaming other people for being unconvinced or confused.
Elsewhere in the newsletter, the author advocates for a form of FDMA, where users operate on different, dynamically allocated frequencies and all of them are received at once. P25 trunked radios used by almost all law enforcement in the US operate on a system like this.
I think the vitriol from those who are in the space either professionally or as an amateur comes from the fact Meshtastic is repeating mistakes we knew about in the 80s at the latest, for which reams if literature freely exists.
It would be more fair to criticize Meshtastic for not being clear enough about the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a low-speed ad-hoc mesh network, and for not actively encouraging people to seek other hardware and software if their use cases are not well-matched to what Meshtastic hardware is capable of. A one size fits all solution simply isn't possible, and Meshtastic can't be the right answer for everyone.
Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing, but I don't even see a movement to switch over to something more robust.
I'd argue it's everything. A network architecture that requires serious fixed infrastructure should probably be an entirely separate project from the ad-hoc mesh formed solely by cheap battery-powered portable/handheld gadgets. And everyone should be realistic about what "meaningful traffic" is for a network with a default data rate of ~1kbps; it's not reasonable to expect that to support the kind of chatter a busy IRC server would see.
Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?
* They made incredibly poorly designed software — the firmware and the mobile apps — and then yell at you for “using it wrong” * The refuse to admit they made a mistake with the 7 hop limit and call you an idiot for not believing in their garbage “simulator” * They write nasty responses to app reviews and GitHub issues because they’re petulant children. Just go read the responses, and look at the hissyfit the of the primary app developer in discord. * They’ve taken down multiple community groups because they decided they needed to be a business rather than an open-source project. Seriously just go look at the history in their discord #trademark channel. They’re on the verge of evil.
All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I have. I emailed them a couple of weeks ago and they responded promptly and professionally.
> All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
You want me to read thousands of GitHub issue comments and discord messages in search of bad behavior?
If you have examples of the Meshtastic team behaving badly, why not link to them? The burden of proof is on you, not me.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I think LoRa messaging is neat but I have no investment or relationship with Meshtastic in particular.
Hobbyist "mesh networking" communities readily adopt suboptimal modulation, frame specification, packet format, encoding, ineffective mesh arrangements, flood-prone routing mechanisms, poor reference hardware, and bloated user interfaces, while often ignoring basic practices like forward error correction, collision detection/multiplexing, trust mechanisms. Community solutions tend to be opinionated in the worst ways ("we assumed you'd use an arduino" or "here's a mandatory packet header field to indicate whether you're currently in a hot air balloon") and under-constrained in areas where opinion would be helpful "our client UI has 75 configurable options -- get one wrong and you won't be able to communicate."
By the time there is a "community" it's too late to address these issues: network effects have already locked in the worst design decisions.