Meshtastic – Testing the Mesh Network on the Swedish Countryside

• 2025-08-19
• 6-minute read

Table of contents

I have been curious about Meshtastic for a while. Now that c’t Magazin (a popular German computer magazine) had a good cover story on it, it was finally time to test it. In the following, I will briefly introduce Meshtastic, present ready-to-go node alternatives, and report on my off-grid node including unexpected messenges from an airplane.

Meshtastic

Meshtastic is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”. It can be used for messaging – including outdoor, emergency, or blackout preparedness use cases – as well as remote monitoring or sensing applications.

Roughly speaking, the Meshtastic software consists of two parts: the node firmware and the user-facing client. The firmware is run on a low-power microcontroller, where the popular Espressif ESP32 and Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 appear to be the most common ones. Both are relatively cheap and widely available, a complete basic node costs around 20 €. This will include an ESP32 microcontroller and the LoRa (short for long range) radio.

Depending on the conditions (radio, configuration, antennas, placement, weather, …), LoRa can achieve ranges considerably above 100 km. In practice it communicates reliably in ranges of approx. 10 km. The idea of Meshtastic is to connect numerous LoRa-capable nodes to a mesh using a routing protocol, which allows all nodes to communicate to each other. As it does not rely on the internet or any other network and the nodes are low power enough to be run on batteries for days, Meshtastic can be run truly off grid.

The node is usually not designed for the user to interact with it directly, it often comes without a screen and only one or two buttons. Instead, you connect to the node via Bluetooth with your smartphone or computer, and run a client app or web application.

Node Alternatives

Being chronically short of time, I wanted to test Meshtastic without too much tinkering (no soldering or 3D printing), and fortunately there are several alternatives out there that work out of the box. These range from handheld devices to statically-mounted long range base stations, a few examples:

• LILYGO® T-Deck Plus is a self-contained handheld device that comes with a screen and a small physical keyboard for messaging. It combines node and user interface in one device, which is currently unique as far as I know.
• HELTEC® LoRa 32 V3 is a “common” node as described above with an ESP32 and everything else you need including a simple case but excluding a battery. It can be powered via USB C, is cheap (< 20 €) and very popular.
• Seeed Studio® SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E is a small, credit card sized (but thicker) mobile node that comes with the nRF52840 and a battery. It looks to me like one of the more refined entries into Meshtastic but range might be a bit limited as it does not have an external antenna.
• Seeed Studio® SenseCAP Solar Node P1-Pro and Keepteen D5 LoRa are nodes that are designed to be mounted on a fixed location. Both bring a solar panel and have slots for 18650 batteries for continuous off-grid operation.

Several of the nodes also bring GNSS / GPS receivers so they can periodically share their position. This can be interesting for outdoor use cases where you want to keep track of one another without relying on an internet connection like hiking or festivals.

As Meshtastic has gained momentum, it can make sense to checkout the devices section of the Meshtastic documentation for additional alternatives.

My Off-Grid Node

As I want to test long term off-grid operation and the SenseCAP Solar Node P1 was out of stock, I went for the Keepteen D5 LoRa in a configuration that includes the nRF52840 for increased battery life. The Keepteen D5 LoRa is essentially a solar-powered battery box, where they placed a Meshtastic node (in my configuration the RAK® WisBlock RAK4631) into two of the six battery slots and added two external antennas (LoRa and Bluetooth).

I ordered a configuration without batteries, so I added two 18650 batteries (2600mAh each) that I bought separately. Only after booting the node a few times, I read that it is important to connect the antennas before starting the node to avoid damaging the radio.

The first thing I did was making sure I run the latest Meshtastic firmware. I followed the “Drag & Drop method” which was really easy: after downloading the latest firmware file, connect the node via USB. When you press the node’s reset button twice, it will appear as a storage device. Then you can just move the firmware file to the storage device and you are done. That was surprisingly straight forward!

Overall, the Keepteen D5 LoRa made a solid impression but the 8 screws for the case were quite flimsy and going right into plastic. When closing the box, I wanted to make sure it is tight enough to sustain Swedish weather but ended up forcing one of the screws and damaging it. Hopefully, I will not have to open it again soon…

I made sure I could connect to the node via the Meshtastic Android App from F-Droid using Bluetooth. Then I mounted the node at the top of my roof, where I could reuse a hole where I previously removed an old TV antenna.

Is Anybody Out There?

As soon as the node was up and running, I checked whether I could see other nodes but unfortunately there were none. Given my location at the Swedish countryside outside of Borås, this was not a big surprise. After a few days, my node detected other nodes but so far only intermittently. If I can trust the information in the app, I do seem to get direct contact with nodes in Denmark (ca. 150 km line of sight distance) from time to time.

Now after ca. two weeks, my node has heard of 78 nodes but was not able to exchange information like public keys with most of them due to packet loss over the distance. So, the majority is listed as “unknown”. I guess that several of the seen nodes were mobile ones carried around in a car which connected me to a wider network for few minutes only. As a result, I have received a few interesting messages but have not been able to get an acknowledge on a sent message, yet.

Unexpected Contact

A week after mounting my node, I did receive some surprising messages! It appears that I received them from a passenger on an airplane flying over my node. I only saw the messages the next day but looked up the mentioned flight. The timing seems to match and the distance from 9 km altitude was around 20 km to my node, so I guess it is possible. Quite unexpected! 😊

Overall, the combination of affordability and range make Meshtastic very interesting. I hope the network will grow to include me more reliably soon. 🙂 After these first steps, I will keep an eye on my node and am curious to see whether the solar panel and two batteries are sufficient to power it during winter.

I have several topics in mind that I want to have a closer look at including the network’s security, and a few range tests once my other nodes arrive.

Posts in this series

• Meshtastic – Testing the Mesh Network on the Swedish Countryside