I’ve looked into Meshtastic, I have a pair of nodes. I am solidly not impressed.

I live in a wooded area, I can shout farther than the range of these nodes. It’s hilariously pathetic. Yes I know people who live on mountaintops can hear the gods themselves on this thing but in the forest the RF spectrum ends at 300MHz. The U in UHF stands for USELESS. So unless you’re in the room with someone else who has a node, the experience of using it is turning on MQTT and only making contacts that way. Which means you’ve bought a badly made low power radio to connect your phone to itself.

The software is pretty bad, too. It’s got a lot of the standard FOSS defects, there’s a LOT of features that are about 1/3 of the way implemented and the feature set is different from platform to platform. On the Android app, you can “reply” to someone else’s message, almost like conversation threading. On the web UI, that feature isn’t supported so the message just comes through with less context. There’s emoji reactions! On the mobile app, you can see someone has reacted with an emoji to your message. There’s no way to see who, because if you tap on the emoji you’ll respond with the same emoji, so the identity of your contact will just be a mystery forever. On the web UI, reactions aren’t a thing, and it looks like someone posts a message with a single emoji in it. So you can tell who posted it, but without the context as to why.

There’s a range test function that sets a node to kind of an automatic beacon, so you can take another for a walk or drive and see just how truly pathetic the range is, and your mobile node will store its GPS coordinates…forever. They made it able to store it as a file but did not provide the ability to erase it.

There’s like five ways of interfacing with the microcontroller’s GPIO or serial bus to attach external hardware, each more convoluted and limiting than the last. Oh, and if you want to do some like remote telemetry or control across the mesh, I hope you like spamming everybody, because even though it has the concept of private channels, you’re not allowed to use any of them. Almost all automated messaging is forced into the Primary channel.

The only thing I can see that recommends Meshtastic over Meshcore or Reticulum is it’s relatively easy to get two nodes talking to each other on Meshtastic, you’ve just got to make sure like 40 settings match on two devices.