Bitchat over Meshcore 1.14.1

2 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by eddieoz

2 Comments

janandonly

9 hours ago

I was recently setting up a Meshtastic network with a bunch of nerdy friends.

The question came up if/when we should switch over to MeshCore.

My feeling is that MeshCore will function better once active, but is harder to set up.

The fact it can now route BitChat messages makes is a bit more useful.

As it happened, I was just reading Sirius question about using WiFi Aware with Bitchat: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsr8d0z52qxuptj05lz4stcv0xf2hyd...

eddieoz

an hour ago

They are different purposes. Meshtastic was better when you were online in the field, or without an established infrastructure. Meshcore is better when you are building an infrastructure in a city, because you will have better previsibility of repeaters, and have a better routing system.

Here in Tallinn, we had a growing Meshtastic network but because of a few misconfigured nodes, the network was always congested, slow, bloated with messages arriving less than 50% of the time.

Then we started to move to Meshcore, and the network seems healthier than when with Meshtastic. We are improving the access to other regions by well-placed repeaters and are talking to the Latvian community to expand and connect both countries.

About WiFi-aware, I think we still have constraints about distance, which is a little broader than Bluetooth but doesn't solve the problem because it's a low-power WiFi.