How to bild a Meshtastic Network?

Support
1

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to build a Meshtastic Network for emergencies in my region. But at the moment I don’t really understand, how I can achieve this goal. What is important for the network and how I can implement it. Currently I have set up 3 Nodes. The Nodes are at a “higher” position and every node can reach another node, so I have a triangle.

Yesterday I tried to capture how far a “client” can reach this network. And one of the problem was, that I had blind spots, even not far from the router node.

I know that some people here already have an emergency network. So how are you handling these blind spots?

And what is the use case of meshtastic as an emergency network? Let’s say, I have a Network in my region. Now a client want to say something, so he is using the primary channel. And now? The message goes through the network and when a client is offline / not reachable / in a blind spot, he doesn’t get the message at all.

Maybe some one can help me out a little bit. Because, I think, it’s a good idea to have an emergency network. But it has to be usable.

2

If you’re looking for an actual reliable tool, look elsewhere. This isn’t it.

3

I am trying to get over this fundamental issue by having well-placed nodes capable of running Store & Forward (S&F). Then people can retrieve messages missed by contacting the S&F node. On Android this is done by sending the S&F node a direct message containing only “SF”. Then missed messages are re-sent. One can also use a Bulletin Board system to post messages (Bulletin board system BBS). I think such features make the Mesh extremely interesting and robust. Running such nodes solar is proving (for me at least) to be far harder than e.g. RAK nodes. Hope that helps.