I first heard about Meshtastic from a blog post that made the rounds on Hacker News.
The author lived on a boat and used Meshtastic radios to stay in touch without cellular networks. Meshtastic allows you to send short text messages (around 200 characters) over long ranges without cell towers or satellites. It works by creating a mesh network of low-power LoRa devices that relay messages on behalf of peers. Because it uses license-free radio frequencies (in the ~915 MHz ISM band), no ham license is required.
My First Radio
I ordered a pair of Heltec V3 LoRa radios (the ones I bought), which are small devices based on the ESP32 microcontroller with a LoRa modem. These radios didn't come with GPS, which in hindsight I regret because Meshtastic can share your location if a GPS is present. I also picked up a third-party antenna upgrade, since the community warned that the cheap antennas bundled with these devices are nearly useless (yet another thing I learned in hindsight)
Out of the box, the devices had outdated firmware and wouldn't communicate with current Meshtastic apps. Fortunately, flashing the latest firmware was straightforward using the official Meshtastic Web Flasher (a browser-based tool at flasher.meshtastic.org). By connecting the device via USB and using Chrome (which supports the WebSerial API), I flashed the newest Meshtastic firmware without installing any software.
Initial Setup
With fresh firmware, I could configure and manage the radios using the Meshtastic mobile app (available for Android/iOS) over Bluetooth. There's also a web client (client.meshtastic.org) that works over USB or Wi-Fi. One quirk I learned: many Meshtastic devices can work over both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but you typically use one interface at a time for management. On my device, it was not possible to use both at the same time, which led to some confusion.
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