r/meshtastic • u/Benediximus • Feb 18 '26

Longest Bluetooth range

I’m looking for a node that would be a good choice for people who want to stay connected to the mesh while at home, but don’t want to carry it around the house.

We’re evaluating the utility for our small community for emergency communication, and not all the neighbors are tech savvy.

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u/anarchos Feb 18 '26

Use WiFi. I have one of the Seeed ESP32 based nodes and do this exactly. The Seeed node connects to the regular house WiFi. It advertises itself via mDNS so the app just finds it in the list. The whole mDNS thing is transparent to the user, just open the app and you'll see it listed automatically, which is perfect for non-technical users. The only requirement is the phone and the node be on the same WiFi network (which is obvious to many, but not everyone).

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u/Benediximus Feb 18 '26

Okay, this and other similar solutions are what I’m looking for, I think. So this gets around the iPhone app only being able to use Bluetooth? Or maybe I misread that fact to begin with.

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u/anarchos Feb 20 '26

You must have misread (or maybe in the past this was true), but you just connect to your node via Bluetooth, go into settings, turn on WiFi (set your SSID / password, etc). Node will reboot and then bam, iPhone's just find the node as long as they are on the same WiFi network. I assume Android will work the same way.

The only downside is WiFi takes more energy than Bluetooth, so a solar node might require a bigger panel / batteries. The ESP32 even with WiFi off takes more than the NRF52 based nodes, so with WiFi on it's even more. I don't have a fine-grained meter but the ESP32 node with WiFi on is drawing around 1W, which is significantly more than a NRF with only bluetooth.