What is Meshtastic?

While technically Meshtastic is not ham radio as it uses unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) bands like 900MHz or 868MHz, this is the biggest crossover topic in the amateur radio community in several regions right now.

Meshtastic uses tiny, cheap ($30), battery-powered LoRa radios that text each other without cell towers or internet. They form a “mesh” network – if you text your friend 5 miles away, your message hops through other users’ nodes to get there. LoRa radios are a type of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) radio technology that allows for long-range, low-bandwidth communication between devices. They are known for their low power consumption, enabling long-distance data transmission over several kilometers in rural areas and hundreds of meters in urban settings.

Ham radio operators in several regions are adopting Meshtastic en masse as the modern “apocalypse communicator”. They are building solar-powered repeater nodes and placing them on mountains to build massive off-grid text networks.