How to setup repeaters to cover a town

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How the inter-device mesh retransmission/forwarding works?

If we would like to cover a Euro residential town of says (just an easy whole number) 3 km by 3 km. Says, put repeater at 1 km apart on square grid. Total 9 repeater on 3 by 3 km grid.

Rover will be 600 meters maximum from any repeater, so is very safe that message will be heard.

Do we have to somehow configure the routing/retransmission or it is done automatically.

In this case, multiple repeaters will hear the rover initial trnsmission. Repeaters will hear multiple repeaters as they re-transmit the message. I believe it has a maximum hop count of says, three so message will die down after a number of ‘repeat/retransmission’.

Does ‘repeater’ run different firmware than normal rover? Repeater (base station) do NOT need internet, right? (to update the routing table or other system stuff via ‘admin’ channel??)

Is the mesh retransmission use simple flood-mode re-transmission or some refined way after building up an ‘internal map’ knowing which radio path work or not work? Many thanks

2

Firstly see:

for the different roles. All use the same firmware, the role is a ‘setting’.

And Device Configuration | Meshtastic
talks about the ‘reboardcast mode’ Most roles have it setup to automatically retransmit, but can be technically be configured independantly.

As for ‘routing’ in general meshtastic uses a relative simply that all messages just get retransmitted blindly. aka ‘flood routing’

Yes, the Hop limit is configable. Messages are retransmitted until hop count reaches 0

It doesnt really keep a ‘map’ of the nodes, nor which routes a packet takes though the nodes. Althoug can find it out on a ‘ad-hoc’ basis, by running a traceroute.

Because there is real possiblitie of a device receiving a packet multiple times, (via differnt routes in the network), it should automatically ignore duplicates (each packet has a unique id to faciliate this)

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