Going to Mesh

The station could bridge voice and watch its own health. The next move was a different kind of radio entirely: small, cheap, long-range, low-power LoRa mesh. Not for voice. For text, telemetry, and reach.

Two networks went on at once, Meshtastic and MeshCore, running side by side on the same box. That alone is unusual, and it set up something useful later.

The gateway

The real build here was a command gateway. Send a short text from a handheld on a private channel and the station answers: weather, your grid, nearby repeaters, a situation report, a callsign lookup. One dispatcher handles it across every transport. The full design is here: A Field Command Gateway for the Mesh.

Two pieces hang off that gateway that are worth their own reads. One is an intelligent assistant you can ask from the radio in your hand, with no internet at the radio: A Pocket Elmer on the Mesh. The other is the thing the two-network setup made possible, a bridge that lets a user on one mesh talk to a user on the other: Bridging Two Meshes.

And because the nodes carry GPS, the station can answer where you are and how far home is, straight from the radio’s own fix: Where Am I, and How Far From the Station.

All of this worked on the bench and in the yard. The question that mattered was what happened when you drove away.

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