Orienteering Control?

Builds / Use Cases
1

Hi folks,

I’m interested in setting up a meshtastic mesh for orienteering style events and general outdoors activities.

I’ve got a couple of t-beam v1.1s on the way and will probably pick up a 3rd device to use as a relay to get started with and check out the basic concept.

I’ve been reading and watching a lot of meshtastic info over the last few days and now I’ve become whatever the internet research equivalent of “nose-blind” is so apologies if this is in the wrong place or just a stupid question!

Essentially I want one device to be used by the race director or whoever to communicate with the various runners out on the ground and I’m envisioning some sort of mast mounted antenna for this role. Then the runners/pairs/teams will all be running around with handheld devices.

As far as I know it should be possible to broadcast and direct message as required.

What I’m unsure of is whether the system rebroadcasts via the racers’ devices anything received from the controller to ensure safety messages reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible?

Essentially, if at least one user can see the controller will the message then ping around the other users until they’ve all seen it if everyone can see someone?

If this isn’t the case then I assume I could message that device as a dm and the message will hop to it unless they’re out of comms with everyone?

I suspect this will become a lot clearer once I’ve actually got the devices set-up!

2

As someone that competed in Orienteering events in High School, I love this idea! I know this is something myself and @GUVWAF have previously discussed. Would be great to see! As far as your question about whether each device will rebroadcast, yes that is how the mesh is created. More info can be found here: Introduction | Meshtastic

3

Cool, good to hear you like the idea!

Now I’ve re-read my question I realise I didn’t phrase it at all well and missed the key point I was concerned about, specifically about broadcast attempts and times - that’ll teach me to pay more attention to what I’m actually doing…

Thanks for the response though, I’ve since found a bit more info on broadcast attempts etc so I’ll have a read of that later.

Cheers!

1 Like
4

Just be careful increasing the hop limit, as it’ll more times than not cause issues rather than fix any. The default of 3 is typically a good value.

5

Ha, I saw that - first thought was turn that right up to max then assumed there’s probably a reason that’s not the default!

I’ve not read into it yet but I’m hoping store and relay is the key to getting max coverage if somebody misses the initial transmission?