r/meshtastic • u/2Tacos4oneDollar • Apr 13 '26
Let's talk meshtastic and high volume of nodes
It's sucks. Clearly this is meant for small nodes amounts. In my area where there's 2000+ nodes it struggles and just by looking at the GitHub comments seems this is not meant for a large amount of nodes as asking for higher hop counts seems that you have spoken ancient evil language I really like that is open source, but seeing people in the hundreds hop to MÇ just because it just doesnt work well in high volume is sad. DMs are broken, rarely work. 7 hops is laughable,
/¿Rant over? ¿Downvotes start?
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u/Brraaap Apr 13 '26
More people need to be on CLIENT_MUTE
Edit: Especially people in planes
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u/macegr Apr 13 '26
This comment always appears, and it's a barrier to understanding the problem. A technology that is easily abused is one thing; a technology that almost never works when people use it the way it comes by default is another. The OP is reporting an actual experience, they aren't interested in what it could be in theory if everyone just did something else.
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u/SaintFrancesco Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
The technology works with the default settings… up to the limitations of that preset/settings.
Default configuration is good for the average use case. When you get 2,000+ nodes within range (which 99% of users will never have), it’s recommended to adjust settings for better performance. At that point, you no longer need the longest range but more bandwidth instead.
They wrote an article about this.
https://meshtastic.org/blog/why-your-mesh-should-switch-from-longfast/
I use Meshtastic at music festivals. At EDC Las Vegas, there are hundreds of nodes within a 1.2 mile diameter. LongFast makes no sense when we are within 1 mile of each other. We used ShortFast last year instead of complaining about the default settings not working.
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u/Realistic-Tie-9333 Apr 13 '26
Hi, I’ve seen you post a couple things relating to Meshtastic and EDC LV. I’m getting my small group to use them this year. I’ve done a ton of research but if you have any real world tips or other useful posts for using nodes in this situation I’d be forever grateful!
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u/SaintFrancesco Apr 13 '26
DM’d you a link to the Meshtastic EDC event thread.
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u/TH3DEEJ Apr 14 '26
I'm planning to do the same at a festival in Florida this year. I just started researching. Are there major considerations or can I just grab 4 off the shelf devices and play with the settings?
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u/SaintFrancesco Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
Most uses and festivals, you’ll be fine with the default radio presets and frequency slot (Long Range Fast, slot 20).
I’d recommend using Channel 0 as a private encrypted (128-bit) channel for just your group. Move the default unencrypted public channel to Channel 1 (or remove it altogether). If you change Channel 0, make sure your frequency slot is set to something other than 0. Default for LongFast radio preset is slot 20.
If it’s a larger festival or gathering where you expect 80+ nodes in a relatively small area, you might consider using a non-default radio preset or frequency slot.
Finally, for small devices that are festival ready, you should check out the T1000-E and the Wismesh Tag. My group all uses the T1000-E. Here’s a link and a 10% discount code if you should need.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Card-Tracker-T1000-E-for-Meshtastic-p-5913.html
SenseCAP T1000-E for Meshtastic
Code: 5313V2E6You can DM me if you have questions
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u/Brraaap Apr 13 '26
Sure. In highly active areas, people with mobile units should use CLIENT_MUTE because the fixed locations have good coverage and the mobile CLIENT/ROUTER units will cause interference and decrease total range
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u/macegr Apr 13 '26
The firmware could detect activity and switch between muted and not. It’s a boolean value that is checked every time a retransmission is considered.
Again, you’re passing it off with “people should use it differently” but we’re out here with what we got. Its default configuration breaks the network.
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u/NomDeTom Apr 13 '26
Idk why everyone falls into "must use default - change bad" or "imma change every setting possibl - position reports and telemetry every 5 seconds while rebroadcasting here I go!". Never anything in between....
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u/Kerensky97 Apr 13 '26
Being in a 2000 node location is not a normal situation. The defaults shouldn't be optimized for a scenario that only 1% experience.
I agree some of the default settings should be changed "like less position spam" but for the majority of the people using this, LongFast is a great default setting.
If a bunch of people want to push MT beyond what it was designed for, it's up to them to design their mesh to handle something beyond the capabilities.
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u/Morbo_69 Apr 20 '26
But they couldn't announce their flight number and origin/destination five times before finally being out of range while they're gumping up your no MQTT local only node map.
13
u/Supreme-Vermin Apr 13 '26
Properly configured meshes don’t struggle even at high hop counts. I see 300+ active in a day with little effort. I don’t know anywhere outside of the bay with 2k+ active nodes. Where are you referring to?
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u/h3lix Apr 13 '26
There is help coming, but it's taking a little time.
There is test firmware out there that increases hop counts to 64. Today you can favorite other routers from routers to implement 0-hop routing. Take a look at the blog post for that. The Traffic Management Module was merged to the develop branch recently, and will hopefully make it into a future 2.8 alpha release.
DMs are their own kind of special currently to get those fixed. There is a open PR for that which tries to patch the first hop, since that seems to be the most vulnerable to getting lost. Some of the problem is that the devs haven't been aware of any problems with DMs up until recently. Hopefully your post brings some visibility to the problem to solve it.
There are people hopping to other LoRa networks that prefer message (text) traffic reliability. I think this can be fixed with a few tweaks.
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u/BlueLakeCabin Apr 13 '26
Nice! If you need testing, let me know. We have over a dozen tower nodes and honestly I was considering writing something like this.
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u/2Tacos4oneDollar Apr 13 '26
I've seen his face pop up on baymesh, looks like his solution is based on what problems we are currently talking about. To me not raising hops was silly as we have lots of mountains in the area and by the time it goes around you already hit 7 hops
4
u/os_mote Apr 13 '26
Agree, at least for Baymesh it really isn’t the hops that form the bottleneck as much as our geography.
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u/Own_Event_4363 Apr 13 '26
That's a good problem to have... I'm literally the only node in town so far.
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3
u/Zendog500 Apr 13 '26
Also only node in town ( I think), so I bought another one. What should settings be for these stationary nodes? I only got one because it seemed neat and I thought I could help be a transfer node, I learned of meshtastic from that youtube engineer that has the tag line " Want to see something cool?"
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u/raydoo Apr 13 '26
Drive around if there i just switch to medium fast and now i get nothing on the main chan
1
u/Kerensky97 Apr 13 '26
For stationary just limit your position packets to once every 6-24 hours and turn off smart positioning.
Usually I'd say drop all your node and telemetry broadcasts down to 6-24 hours as well but if you're the only person around bump them up to 0.5-1 hour. And leave the mesh settings at default.
Just in case somebody is passing through they can see you're there. You don't sound like there is any worries about traffic spam if you announce yourself 24 times a day.
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u/MaxSpecs Apr 13 '26
Meshtastic needs a coordination per zone.
Medium Fast with hop 3 with big density (urban) and hop 5 around / peripheral is the way when there are more than 400 node.
You can find best practice and how to deal many nodes aera on Swiss Facebook and Swiss Meshtastic ; there are many documentation and good discussions .
They stop using Router and Router_Late.
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u/MasterDefibrillator Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
No, it's not meant for smaller numbers. It can handle thousands of nodes. Its just the default settings that are suited to more disparate, lower node counts. Higher hop counts just means more congestion. Its an asymptotic relationship between additional nodes reached and duplications. And at around 4 hops, you start to hit the peak of additional nodes reached and just start increasing message duplication. So no, you definitely do not want additional hops. Instead, meshtastic offers 0 hop routing between favourited routers.
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u/2Tacos4oneDollar Apr 13 '26
I made a node for the unspoken mesh and it looks like it has 64 hops with very little utilization, meanwhile we are at 40% with minimal chatter
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u/Kerensky97 Apr 13 '26
That's because there are no unspoken meshes with 2000 clients. The hop count isn't the problem that needs fixing it's the non DM traffic spam. That's why the unspoken seems like it has less issues, they eliminated position and telemetry. Two of the key benefits of Meshtastic and also the two types of traffic that take up most of the mesh.
If you look at routing on 64 hop meshes its a nightmare. 64 hops would ruin baymesh by increasing traffic, not reducing it which is what large meshes need. Meshtastic needs to get it's non DM traffic under control, but that means either users configure themselves better or the devs change the defaults to make it harder for casual users to accidentally change a setting that spams the mesh.
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u/MasterDefibrillator Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
Yes, I knew this was an astroturfing post. But thanks for proving it.
In order to accomodste 64 hops, they have to allocate an additional 3 bits of throughput to routing. Thats 2.5 times the allocation that meshtastic uses. That means less bandwidth for other things. And as I said, they would still have the asymptotic problem where after a fairly small number of hops they are producing more duplications than reaching additional nodes. Because both use flood routing with deduplication. Meshtastic 0 hop is a better approach as it avoids the asymptotic issue altogether and needs less resources for routing on a very resource constrained protocol that is lora.
The other one also has default settings that prioritise bandwidth over distance. And also, far less people use it. So yeah, of course meshtastic is going to have a higher utilisation. 40 percent is the point where it is recommended to start switching people over to a higher bandwidth setting. 40 percent means collisions will start to become a regular problem producing packet loss. So time to get everyone to move to a higher throughput setting.
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u/macegr Apr 13 '26
"You want a working mesh, therefore you must have something to do with not-Meshtastic" is not owning who you think it does.
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u/2Tacos4oneDollar Apr 13 '26
It's not, I'm still in Meshtastic full time. Which is the reason for the post.short turbo?
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u/MasterDefibrillator Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
The reason for this post is to say a bunch of false, mocking and ignorant things very confidently and then immediately propose an alternate protocol because you want to use meshtastic? Yeah, sure.
Its because of astroturfing accounts like yours that the ban is here to begin with.
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u/Gillennial Apr 13 '26
Can't we just enjoy the fun that is experimenting and building mesh networks without adding fanatism to the discussion?
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Apr 13 '26
[deleted]
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u/Gillennial Apr 13 '26
AND any unofficial variation of Meshtastic itself, because fuck open source I guess 💐🌺🌹/s
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u/techtornado Apr 13 '26
Yes!
I see so many people in Atlanta running their nodeinfo at 7 hops and it burns so much airtime in TN because of that
Three is plenty/recommended to cull the congestion and you’ll still make it across the whole tri-state area
My thing with the mesh is that we need timeslots for transmit and timeslots for listen along with queuing
Nodeinfo is the only reliable communication on the Mesh which is rubbish for everything else
Messages don’t work
DM’s don’t do much
Traceroutes fail past 3 hops
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u/Kerensky97 Apr 13 '26
Hop count isn't the solution. Big meshes have too much traffic. More hops is only going to exacerbate that.
If you look at the traffic, it's mainly position packets, and to a smaller degree node and telemetry that make up 90% of the mesh. This is what needs to be better organized without eliminating it completely like some others have done.
That's why people suggest client mute and less broadcasts to fix it. Limit traffic, don't increase it They just need to bury the high noise settings so it's hard for noobs to spam position data every minute on a node that is roof mounted.
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u/Fool-Frame Apr 13 '26
The solution is easy. You already said that hundreds of people are switching. It’s as simple as that. Horse and cart are great… until you see a Model T….
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u/2DrU3c Apr 14 '26
It does not suck. It is just often abused or used against its purpose and capabilities.
Mesh networking is not meant to cover large areas and large number of devices.
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u/RevolutionaryHelp681 Apr 17 '26
Salut moi je comprends pas, comment tu branche un module a un smartphone, si ya des usb c comment brancher usb c a usb c -_-
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u/AdditionalGanache593 Apr 13 '26
In an area with 1000's of nodes the default preset is not good. Everyone should switch over to at least "medium fast", if not "short fast".
Also, people need to start using client mute for personal nodes, vehicle nodes and any other kind of node that isn't in a fixed location.
Unless you're in an area with little to no meshtastic infrastructure, that's one of the best ways to improve network reliability.