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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.

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Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).

Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.

Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)

Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4

We are not seeing a correlation between channel saturation and/or alien non-related stations.

IMHO MT has a fundamental algorithmic flaw when it comes to dealing with very unreliable and lossy links.

Sounds good. But there are ~10x fewer nodes in my area :(

The nearest Meshtastic and Meshcore nodes to me are 20 km away over hilly granite terrain.

Anyway how would either network fare in the Iranian situation where the authorities are actively trying to shutdown communications? Sure the authorities could simply flood the network with traffic.

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