Meshcore adventures

Overview

Recently my friend got really into MeshCore and the idea of a fully off-the-grid mesh network that’s end to end encrypted and of course when he goes down a fun rabbit hole i joined it.

Meshcore deployment in Iceland is very limited, when we started there were 3 repeaters total in Reykjavik, Now we have two repeaters at each of our home and are working to a end goal of being able to send a message to Selfoss a town 70km from Reykjavík.

Repeaters

We bought the Heltec V4 for our at home repeaters with the ESP32-S3 chip variant, Although ESP chips are notorious for being very bad at low power we bought them since they work well for just at home repeaters, In addition we bought many variants of antennas to checkout how good/bad the performance would be. Then we bought plastic casings from the hardware store and started building!

For our personal devices we bought the T-Echo LILYGO

The very first repeater was hacked together from excitement after getting the parts from aliexpress and put it up on the balcony and started driving around town to see the coverage. Yes i know it looks like a bomb and is very jank.

How does it work?

Meshcore uses LoRa (Long Range Radio) uses the 868Mhz band, It’s not a very fast radio but it sacrifices data speed for range, However it really struggles to go through buildings so LoS (Line of Sight) is crucial! The world record is more than 200km between mountains with line of sight!

The network itself is built around repeaters talking to each other. When you send a message it gets picked up by the nearest repeater which then rebroadcasts it to the next one, and so on, hopping from node to node until it reaches whoever you are trying to reach, kinda like passing a note through a classroom however each message is encrypted!

What’s next ?

I’ll keep updating this as we go, when I remember to anyway. Next up is getting more repeaters spread around Reykjavík, and the big goal is pushing into the highlands between Reykjavík and Selfoss with solar powered nodes running off recycled vape batteries.

Coverage

Current coverage of all advertised MeshCore repeaters can be seen here