Meshtastic is an open-source project using low cost LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without little or no communications infrastructure. It’s a portmanteau of Mesh and “fantastic”.
I found it shared on Facebook, which lead me to the subreddit post, which lead me to reading more about it and even finding Lemmy communities and local groups!
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtastic
I also made sure to check if this wasn’t a hail corporate thing. And I also felt like I missed the era of homemade radios. So this is exciting for me!
We have a 14 node mesh in our town, I have never met any of the other owners. Wait till you learn about ATAK
What is ATAK?
He said wait.
I guess I assumed they’d go off and search on their own…
Here’s a field-friendly primer tying together CivTAK/ATAK, MeshTastic, and HALO—three technologies that often orbit the same conversations about civilian coordination, comms, and mapping.
CivTAK / ATAK
What it is:
- ATAK = Android Team Awareness Kit. Originally military, now with a civilian fork called CivTAK.
- Core feature is a shared map with live team positions, annotations, and collaboration tools.
- Functions as a situational awareness (SA) platform—imagine Google Maps supercharged with multiplayer coordination.
Strengths:
- Handles offline maps, topo layers, GIS data.
- Plugin ecosystem (search & rescue tools, drone integration, wildfire overlays).
- Flexible networking: LTE, Wi-Fi, radios, or mesh.
Civilian Role: Used by SAR teams, disaster relief groups, event organizers, and outdoor adventurers.
MeshTastic
What it is:
- An open-source mesh radio project. Small LoRa (long-range, low-bandwidth) radios form a network to pass messages between nodes without cell towers or internet.
- Think of it as walkie-talkies for text data—your phone connects via Bluetooth, and MeshTastic devices relay the packets.
Strengths:
- Long range in rural/open terrain (tens of kilometers with line of sight).
- Extremely low power usage, can run for days on a small battery.
- Ideal for grid-down, remote, or off-grid comms.
Civilian Role: Hiking groups, neighborhood emergency preparedness, off-road expeditions, community mesh networks.
Connection to ATAK:
- With plugins, ATAK can use MeshTastic radios as a data transport layer to sync positions and markers even without cell service.
HALO
What it is:
- HALO (Hazardous Awareness and Location of Operations) is a TAK server implementation designed for civilian organizations.
- Basically the “cloud hub” for CivTAK/ATAK, handling data distribution, group management, and persistent mapping.
Strengths:
- Acts as the glue—users running CivTAK/ATAK connect to HALO for centralized comms.
- Provides persistence: maps, chat logs, annotations survive beyond a single session.
- Supports mixed networks—cellular users, Wi-Fi, and mesh nodes can all sync via HALO.
Civilian Role: Deployed by NGOs, SAR orgs, and local emergency groups to keep coordination structured.
How They Fit Together
Picture a search-and-rescue mission:
- CivTAK/ATAK is the app interface—team members see each other’s positions, hazards, search grids.
- MeshTastic provides the off-grid comms backbone if cell coverage is down—nodes bounce data until it reaches everyone.
- HALO acts as the mission control hub, syncing everyone’s data and maintaining the “source of truth.”
Together, these tools give civilians a command-and-control capability once limited to militaries—but at low cost and with open-source/community-driven energy.
Civilian Ops Tech Primer: Quick Comparison
Tool Role What It Does Strengths Typical Use CivTAK / ATAK Platform (the app/interface) Android app for real-time maps, team tracking, and collaboration. Powerful mapping, plugins, works with many networks. Search & Rescue, disaster response, event coordination, outdoor group safety. MeshTastic Transport (the radio network) Open-source mesh radios using LoRa to pass text/position data phone-to-phone via Bluetooth. Works off-grid, long range, low power, cheap hardware. Off-grid messaging, team position sync in no-signal areas, neighborhood comms. HALO Server / Hub Central TAK server for syncing users, maps, data, and managing persistence. Acts as “mission control,” supports mixed connections (cell, Wi-Fi, mesh). NGOs, SAR teams, emergency groups needing a shared source of truth. How They Work Together
- CivTAK/ATAK = the cockpit (what you see and interact with).
- MeshTastic = the radio link (how data moves when cell towers fail).
- HALO = the headquarters (where all info is stored, managed, and synced).
In practice:
- A SAR team in the mountains uses MeshTastic radios to pass position updates.
- Each rescuer’s phone shows the shared map through CivTAK/ATAK.
- Back at the operations center, HALO aggregates everything, letting coordinators direct the search with a reliable, persistent map.
I’ve gone down parts of this rabbit hole (reading, not implementation). Wish I could guarantee that I could set anything up (including just setting up Meshtastic nodes in fun places) without getting arrested for setting up what can only look like an espionage infrastructure network to the government.
My man!
You should start a sub-lemmy, would subscribe.
Currently working on a sideproject using meshtastic and conventional LoraWAN:
We have dozens of smaller streams here that are somewhat flash flooding prone, often with extremely locally limited precipitation. (The last time I took damage the cell was 500m wide and the damage area was only 1.2km long. We received almost 80l/m² in one hour) This makes monitoring and warning extremely difficult and the official water level probes by the government are too far downstream and only show larger issues - for the people living on the smaller ones the damage is done - for some it might also be too late to warn them off upcoming backwater as the communication options are often difficult for them.
The idea is to use no-contact water level probes deployed to strategically useful locations and maintained by locals to monitor the level and flow of the water, transmit via conventional LoraWAN and meshtastic and inform both the local communities and official emergency response channels of the levels.
Currently still in an early stage but we are seeing more interest in that and it might end up as an official research project by a local university. (If anyone has any recommendations for cheap reliable sensors let me know…this is the current main issue - the whole node needs to be under 250€ in the end)
We see “-tastic” used as a suffix so often that it seems genuinely odd to see it explicitly explained.
Meshtastic is nice. I have one node already, debating myself if that’s enough or if I should get/build a solar node.
I was very fortunate that there’s an active community in my city. I can reach nodes 50km away without a big antenna.
How? I get about three blocks.
A router node is located about 300 meters away from me on top of a high building. Most of the other nodes I see are repeated by this node.
That tracks.
Have a node up in the attic which is bridged to my wifi and into my Matrix server. Of course, in the event of a catastrophe the usage will be direct bluetooth connection from a phone instead.
The range is impressive, my node connects to others several tens of kilometers away.
I’ve got a node on my roof. Solar powered RAKwireless. I can connect using my phone over bluetooth.
Can you give some details for how you bridged it to Matrix? That sounds interesting. (I have a matrix server too)
I believe this is the bridge I’m using: https://github.com/jeremiah-k/meshtastic-matrix-relay
This is great! Looks like they just added BLE support too. Thanks!
That is incredible! You’re doing what I’m just fantasizing about!
Any tutorials or videos on setting something like this up?
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.
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.
You should see the (so far) 7 incomplete ways to manage network devices on the wake of ifcfg being ruled too unsparkly. I’m sure there’s more, but oh God is it ever a mess – and don’t ask why
nmcli conn(notnmtui connas you’ll find) collects crud to bite you in the ass when you really can’t afford it.Lost-boys software is such crap, man.
is that all
Is there som rough map of where this stuff exist?
https://meshmap.net/, but you have to opt-in for your node to show up there. There are ~20 nodes in my vicinity, but only 5 of them are on meshmap.
Four in my city, I didn’t expect that 👍🏻
Is there a community to subscribe to somewhere?
meshtastic@mander.xyz is the largest, but there are a few. Just go to Communities, select “All”, and enter “meshtastic”.
This will be fantastic during the apocalypse and we lose Internet.
Too bad I’ll have lost the Internet so I won’t be able to learn how to get the equipment and set it up, until it’s too lateWhat do you plan to do with it?
The fantasy is that during the Robot Uprising, this allows us to coordinate with the rest of the Human Resistance and ensure mankind’s survival.
The reality is probably just sending Dad jokes to one another.
If you want to have communication available at any kind of protest, and you would rather not provide the authorities with your name and address, Meshtastic can be quite useful. In the US, we have reached the point where that can be a serious issue. In other parts of the world it can be a matter of life or death.
On a practical level, I was thinking of using it for camping/traveling.
Some of the hardware looks like beepers/pagers, and I know a lot of folks that would want one just for that experience again.
You saw that post of the guy on the bus as well then?
I’m curious now. Can you share the link?
Yeah! It was on Facebook when I saw it though and led to the Reddit post.
Fun if you are travelling and go to a new town/city with an active user base.
That’s the dream! Any experiences youve had?
That reminds me, I want to get some walkie talkies for my kids. There may be loRa walkie talkies maybe?
short answer, no.
Long answer, LoRa is a very low bandwidth digital scheme. It can BARELY do SMS-like text messaging. Audio, especially in real time, is way out of the question. There are devices sold as more or less complete Meshtastic nodes with their own built-in UI, one of which looks quite a bit like an old Blackberry, but it’s not exactly kid friendly.
Meshtastic is cool, I haven’t gotten into it. It’s all license free. I say that because some other radio based hobbies need a license (GMRS and ham).
Folks looking into it, many of the devices use Bluetooth to communicate with a phone or computer so you don’t need to type messages directly on the device, but the technology is still off grid. There are totally self contained devices you can type on directly. I just wanted to mention that because seeing “off grid” then seeing them pairing with phones can be confusing. It’s truly only to enter messages and keep devices a little cheaper and easier to use.
@bytesonbike no nodes anywhere near me, and i don’t want to be the first.
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@toynbee i don’t have the patience anymore to do support for those that come after; unfortunately.
That’s fair. I also didn’t know what OP had posted about rogue setups, which is also reasonable. Thanks for the answer!
I don’t know the rules of engagement yet, and the subreddit community seemed neutral/leaning against rogue setups.
As a thought, I wonder if people can/should pair up with outdoor wildlife camera enthusiasts and roll out relay nodes with their drops.
