Palomar Amateur Radio Club STEM Experimentation Lab
📡 LoRa and Meshtastic
The STEMLab Meshtastic node demonstrates the use of LoRa as a long-distance communications protocol. Its high vantage point gives it the ability to reach throughout San Diego County mainly to the south and west of the site.
Note: Using the PARC Meshtastic node (or any Meshtastic node) requires you have a Meshtastic node of your own. PARC's node is identified as "PARC" and "W6NWG". It is freely available to anyone to use.
There is a large selection of Meshtastic devices that can be purchased through retail outlets (like Amazon, Rokland and AliExpress).
Free Meshtastic apps are currently available for Apple iOS and Android devices as well as Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers. Apple users can download the apps in the App Store for their phones, tablets and Mac computers. Android users can download them from the Google Play Store for their phones and tablets. These apps are open source and their source code is usually available on GitHub. The Meshtastic GitHub repository link is in the references below.
Note that being a relatively young open source project, Meshtastic is an evolving project. The firmware for the nodes and the apps are under constant development and new features are added and bugs fixed pretty routinely.
You connect to and control your Meshtastic device using apps like the Meshtastic apps shown on an iPhone and on an Android phone below. These are products of different development teams so the iOS and Android applications don't look identical to each other and can have slightly different capabilities.
Meshtastic iOS iPhone App
Meshtastic Android Phone App
The Node List
The Node List shows the mesh nodes that the device knows about. The node list is built up over time as the node processes messages seen over the mesh. The number of nodes that are kept in the database is typically limited by the memory of the device but is usually around a hundred. Also if too many nodes are seen, the mode will delete ones not heard from in a long time to make room.
There is a lot of useful information available on each of the nodes. Clicking on the node shows some additional information.
Meshtastic Messaging ⓘ Meshtastic Messaging
References:
- Meshtastic Open Source GitHub Repository 🔗 Meshtastic GitHub
Note: PARC does not sell or endorse any products mentioned in these pages.
Information is provided for education and instructional purposes only.