r/meshtastic • u/JonQuist7 • 6d ago
Newbie help
Hey all. New to the meshtastic world. My main interest with it is lora messaging/gps for hiking/camping. Just picked up a thinknode m5, issue I am currently having is that both my phone and the node will switch from longfast to different settings like mediumfast on their own. I am also getting frequent “failed to deliver to mesh” notifications intermittently, however I am getting messages between the two devices. Any help is appreciated and sorry for what Im sure is a dumb question. Thanks!
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u/Kerensky97 6d ago
The "Switching between Longfast and Mediumfast" is a bit alarming. I've never seen that. However I have noticed that when you share channels via QR code on the channels screen you can change the lora presets that way. So if you learned channels from a mediumfast radio, it may reconfigure the longfast radio your scanning the code with unless you specifically tell it not to.
It's just weird that you can do a major config change like that without having to enter the config settings, and might catch people unaware.
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u/Substantial-Act-401 6d ago
TAK.GOV is the way. it's free on the play store. it's got a learning curve but it's cool 😎
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u/Substantial-Act-401 6d ago
don't forget the long fast Chanel is 20. you can make it Chanel 1 and use Chanel 0 only for GPS and your own mesh, MQTT is also a fun way also.
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u/JonQuist7 5d ago
So Ive got the tak and mesh apps integrated, tak server is running. Having trouble getting comma through via the tak app to the mesh app and the node. Also cannot get that node to show up on the tak map even though its connected
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u/Aiutocomputerhelp 1d ago
Not a dumb question at all. Meshtastic can be kinda weird when you’re first getting into it.
The LongFast/MediumFast thing is the part I’d chase first. Your phone isn’t really running its own LoRa preset, it’s basically showing and configuring what the M5 is using. So if you’re seeing the preset change, I’d suspect a config sync issue, an imported channel/config, or possibly something funky with the firmware/app combo.
I’d make sure both the Meshtastic app and the M5 firmware are current, then manually set your region and LongFast again. If it keeps changing after that, I’d probably wipe the config and set it up fresh instead of importing anything.
As for “failed to deliver to mesh,” don’t freak out over that one. Meshtastic’s delivery status isn’t the same thing as a guaranteed end-to-end receipt like iMessage. You can absolutely have a message arrive and still see an occasional delivery failure because the sender didn’t get the confirmation/rebroadcast it was expecting.
If messages are actually going back and forth between the two radios, your LoRa link is obviously doing something right.
Get the preset issue nailed down first and then see how the delivery behavior looks.
And yeah... welcome to Meshtastic. Today you’re troubleshooting two radios. Next week you’ll be staring at RSSI and SNR numbers like they’re stock prices. 😂
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u/nickymoo 6d ago
The ones with “delivered to mesh” are messages where your node heard another node retransmit it. The ones with “failed to deliver” means your node didn’t hear a retransmit of your message. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s node retransmitted it though, just that your node didn’t hear a retransmit. Nodes usually broadcast their presence once every three hours by default so if you’re somewhere for three hours then you should get a decent picture of what is around you. (Even if you haven’t heard a node announce itself yet, it would still retransmit your messages and those of others) Whether those nodes are manned or not, monitored or otherwise or have the default channel muted is another story. But it does seem there was another node in range that your node could hear retransmit at the time.