February 2025 - Busy Month, Stand Alone Devices are a thing!

Howdy.

It's Jon here, and welcome back to the second installment of

Voice of the Mesh, a podcast about everything Meshtastic, and related.

February may have been a short month, but it ended with quite a bang,

so there's plenty to talk about.

As a quick reminder, you'll find links to everything I talk about in the

notes of your podcast player or linked on the voice of the mesh website.

Finally, a word of housekeeping as requested, this podcast is now

available on most major platforms, including Google Podcast, apple Podcast,

Amazon Music, Spotify, and more.

With that, let's talk about the singular big headline of the month,

Meshtastic 2.6, firmware preview.

This was dropped on the blog on February 26th, AKA 2/ 26, and it

features a couple of really big changes.

The first is the introduction of the Meshtastic user interface or

MUI for devices with larger screens like the T deck, the UN phone, also

even systems like Raspberry Pi.

You can now run this new GUI that really allows you to have

a standalone Meshtastic device.

Something fully functional, looks nice and does not require a phone.

Second on the list is another new user interface, this one called InkHUD.

It's for e devices and currently supports a couple of healthtech

and the Lilygo T-Echo.

It's another case where there was nothing wrong with the existing UI on E-ink

devices, but there is so much more that could be done, especially with some

of the larger, nicer, E-Ink displays.

So the developers built a really cool user interface for E-Ink.

That I think is really gonna make them much more popular.

The final item on the large changes for 2.6 is one that is going to be

less visible, but vastly important, especially for large meshes, and that

is next top routing for direct messages.

This is a routing layer for mes tastic, whereas in the past

everything was flooded out regardless.

With this now directed messages.

So that might be a DM to a person, a chat dm, or a direct message between two nodes,

such as for remote node administration or node info requests now have the capability

of actually routing packets between nodes.

This should help reduce mesh overhead overall and prevent

messages from transiting hundreds of miles that they don't need to go.

I did a full dedicated video on the 2.6 features, and there is more details on

everything and including what the next hop routing looks like on the mesh blog,

along with three other smaller features that I'm not gonna talk about here.

So watch the video or check the blog.

As a reminder, 2.6 preview is pre-alpha and it will not show in the web

flasher unless you know the special code it's hinted at on the blog.

2.6 is obviously a big deal right now, but there was still other firmware

development going on, especially in the more stable releases.

But before we get to those, just a reminder that constructive feedback is

always welcome also comment, subscribe, all that jazz, because apparently

we're all obligated to say that list.

You've never listened to a podcast or watched a YouTube video.

I'm sorry.

I'll get back to the firmware now.

2 5 21 Alpha.

At the beginning of the month, they indicated that NRF 52 devices, so

those like the Rack wireless, you should do a full erase and back up

your node keys in case you care, to help the performance of them.

Honestly, you don't need to worry because if you upgrade to 2.6

it will erase your node anyways.

With 2 5 21, power telemetry is broken and in fact that carries forward to 2 5 22.

In 22, the T deck and T watch got a Bluetooth fix and the seed studio T 1000

E got some hardware updates, GPS fixes and a battery estimation fix that last of

which is really nice for the average user.

I thought it was amusing that my T 1000 E would stay on for two days and be at 50%

battery and then an hour later be dead.

But not everyone found that as funny, so they have fixed the

battery curve on that device.

Finally, this month was the 2 5 23 Alpha, which added support

for the new mesh link board.

It's a open source hardware that you can find on GitHub if you wanna

make your own, but there is none for sale at the moment that I found.

Also added support for the XO NRF 52 and weo SX 1262 DIY from Seed Studio.

This is probably one of these smallest Meshtastic nodes you can possibly build.

They are just like postage stamp sized devices.

And they're great for little remote sensors or you just want to toss out a

bunch of really small nodes, although their, radio is a little bit less powered,

so don't think it will be a great router.

They also added wifi support for the Raspberry Pi Pico two W. Keep

in mind that the Pico series is the Arduino like microcontrollers.

This is not for the full fat Linux computer.

And finally, adding support for the BMP three 90 precision pressure

and alternator sensor, which is really great if you care about.

Really detailed pressure or altimetry data out of your Meshtastic hardware

2 5 20 also hit beta.

In the new hardware segment, we have the Femto Fox, which you will

find on GitHub, and there's also a Hexter News article about it.

The Femto Fox as described on GitHub is a Linux-based mesh development platform.

A raspberry pi sized computer with onboard Laura Radio.

Capable of being run with only 0.3 watts, making ideal for solar powered nodes.

I did a quick short on this because I got one.

It's pretty exciting to me.

It's small about the size of a T 1000 E, so credit card size,

but this device runs real Linux.

Yes.

It's a stripped down version of Ubuntu called Fox Buntu,

but it's still a real computer.

It's not a microcontroller.

They also include a 30 DBM LoRa module and ethernet with an

option for a real-time clock.

So this is a fully featured device, which mSRP is for $65 in the US on Etsy, or

65 pounds in the UK on Tindy, but it's currently sold out in the US as we speak.

I am really excited about the Femto Fox.

I have it here on my desk and it will probably be my new router on

my roof to replace my rack wireless.

It's a little bit better, a little bit more powerful LoRa module.

But more importantly, it just makes it easier to update

when it's a Linux computer.

I can SSH into it and I can update mesh d. I don't need to climb onto the roof,

which even though it's fairly easy, my router on the roof is still running

the 2.3 0.9 firmware from May, 2024.

So if I keep it much longer, it will be a year old and no, I cannot

access that device remotely anymore.

The mobile apps do not support that old firmware.

In the realm of events, at the beginning of the month on February one and two

was Foz Dem, which is the free and open source developers European meeting.

I mentioned this last month in voice of the mesh, but the video

for the talk had not been posted.

It is now up and available on the Foss Dem website, which is

again linked in the show notes.

This talk was given by Caveman 99 AKA Thomas, I'm sorry, I'm

not gonna butcher your last name.

He did an excellent job talking about Meshtastic, but I'm also a

little biased since he used some of my presentation as a basis though.

He did a great job updating my hack together, presentation from long ago.

Now we dive into the world of socials.

The first is a video from the official tastic channel from Jonathan Bennett.

It's a two minute rundown of the Meshtastic designer, which

I mentioned last month as it was on the blog previously.

If you haven't tried the designer, he's got a quick rundown of what

it looks like and what it's about.

From Reddit.

We have a post by Mr. Clean 1, 2, 3, about the A L'S story titled Amateur

Radio Emergency Preparedness Act, reintroduced, and the A RRL is the

National Association for Amateur Radio here in the United States.

The story just the most important quote is.

This act would require homeowners associations to accommodate the

needs of FCC licensed amateur radio operators by prohibiting

the enforcement of private land.

Use restrictions that ban, prevent or require the approval of the installation

or use of amateur radio station antennas,

or to simplify if forces HOAs to allow amateur radio antennas,

which they tend not to like.

A lot of the US has HOAs.

It's annoying when you're an amateur radio operator and can't put up an antenna.

I realized that not all Meshtastic users are hams.

In fact, that's one of the joys of Meshtastic is that

you do not need a license.

But this should help that Venn diagram crossover of people who use both.

Though I will say that I think the community has done a great job so far

of coming up with creative and clever ways of hiding Meshtastic nodes, be it

in solar light enclosures or bird boxes.

There's a number of different ways to hide mesh nodes.

If you are in an HOA.

From YouTube, the Channel Digital Rancher brings us the video titled

Meshtastic Mastered for Large Events.

It's about a 10 minute overview of the general usage of Meshtastic

at ham ca 2025, which was in Florida earlier this month.

There are some cool shots of the tower, some description of the infrastructure

nodes, and just a little bit more about how mesh Astic was used at the event.

If you're looking for tips and tricks on how to make mesh testing

work at your event, there's nothing rocket science in this video.

The tldr they used short, fast, and yelled at everyone to use client or client mute.

Pretty standard stuff to be honest.

From Reddit, a Hugo 96 posts about an aerial node for tracking.

Which is an eight DB panel antenna mounted to the exterior of a

plane, which was interesting.

Honestly, it's a bit of a sales pitch for their team tracking

product, but it was a cool concept.

Nonetheless, we haven't seen a lot of Meshtastic radios mounted to the

outside of planes, though I will say using Meshtastic on a plane is clearly

common by the number of posts on Reddit.

In fact, the San Francisco Bay mesh.

Found a lost balloon in the mountains using a happy coincidence of a mesh

member on a commercial flight, who was willing to stick a station G two in

the plains window and managed to pick up a single packet location packet

from the lost balloon, and the next day someone drove up and found it.

So it does in fact work We have a post from Haruki to.

Titled E two 13 paper Mesh Build Update.

Haruki is actually the original creator of the InkHUD ui.

That's in the 2.6 firmware, but they are building a messenger like.

Product.

That's a Healthtech Vision Master E two 13 E in display with the new InkHUD

ui of course, GPS 5,000 million power battery and an M five Stack Card keyboard.

In a nice little case, I imagine that Haruki iss probably

gonna try to sell it soon.

But the instructions in building material are on printable, so

you can totally make your own.

I love the idea of yet another.

Device that's accessible to people.

Easily relatively cheap to build and allows phone independence because the new

InkHUD helps with that and E ink display.

Plus a 5,000 milliamp power battery is gonna be great for battery life.

Another from Reddit is Krono constant three posts his

remote node in the wild update.

It's a nice little field report of a successful deployment

of Meshtastic in a tree.

It also includes a nice build of material, with a 10,000 milliamp

power battery, which makes sense for a remote solar only in a tree build.

'cause I imagine that solar isn't easy to come by there.

I really love to see these posts so that the entire community

can , learn how to build something, what works, what doesn't work.

It's not just a, Hey, I built a thing, but here's how it actually works in real life.

And that is super useful.

We're going to assume that Krono Constant three had approval to use the land and

use the tree that he put this note in.

Though we know certainly other people, are a little bit more, gorilla in their

tactics on the more technical line of things, the ori of self, I'm gonna

assume that's how that's pronounced because they're clearly a Stargate fan.

Posts titled, added a nine 15 megahertz filter to my station.

G two noticeable improvement to signal and range.

Overall, this thread is a great conversation about the use of filters

where they do and don't work, and similarly detailed technical RF stuff.

The or IF self notes that they are near an airport, so they get a lot of RF

interference and putting the filter on.

Helped their, pickup.

This is not true of everyone.

You don't necessarily need a nine 15 megahertz filter.

I live in what is effectively suburbia.

I put a filter on my router on the roof, and it really did not change much.

My range is limited by geography rather than RF interference.

So don't think that if you're not picking up people that you need to

rush out and buy a filter to add.

It may or may not be helpful.

But my fi favorite find from that thread was a guide to filters posted

by the Appalachian Mountain Mesh.

They're located in Georgia and Tennessee.

Finally, we have two fun little posts on Blue Sky.

The first from Puget Mesh, which is, the Seattle Puget Sound and surrounding

areas, where they talk about their dual node infrastructure running

both long, fast and medium fast.

They do a really good job of posting periodically about their new nodes

and, infrastructure that they're putting up and their coverage.

Just in general, do a good job talking about their mesh.

Because it's really interesting to learn what these community meshes are

doing and what is and isn't working.

Another post comes from Bay mesh, that's the San Francisco Bay Area, and

they launched Meshtastic on a balloon.

Different balloon from the one I mentioned previously.

it's a live posted thread, so there's a bunch of different updates.

a rack whiz block and a T 1000 E went up to 107,000 feet of

altitude and came back safe.

The final report of, 32,000 meters, 107,000 feet was from the whiz block on

long, fast, very standard configuration.

Unfortunately, the T 1000 E tops out at 10 kilometers, in altitude.

It does not report GPS data any higher than that.

The.

T 1000 E was running I think medium slow.

The packets were working, but just there was no real location data.

And I think that's because the T 1000 E has more strict don't

use me as a missile protections.

The final segment for today's show is actually from the socials, but something

that I want to talk about in a little bit more depth, and that is hyper mesh.

This originally comes from another YouTube video from the Digital Rancher channel

titled Hyper Mesh Networking Unleashed.

It caught my eye because similar to mesh core, which I mentioned last

month, it's another new interesting mesh technology, but there was a lot more

information here and I have some thoughts.

So first, unlike Mesh Core Hyper mesh is by Spec five, who is a company that

sells complete mesh astic devices.

They're a hardware vendor and there's nothing wrong with that.

Everything they sell though is, very tactical.

It feels a little marked up to me, but I wanna be clear that I have never bought

anything from Spec five and I've never used it, never touched it hands on.

My opinions on how their hardware doesn't and doesn't work, mean very little.

Other than looking at their most basic radio and going, oof, that's $120.

That's a lot.

They may have an amazing setup.

I did look around a little bit more on their site.

They have a Ranger unit, which is obviously a LIGO T deck that sells for

$43 on Lily Lilly Go's website and on spec five, they're selling it for $180.

Now, spec five does include a battery case antenna and GPS, but you could

also get the same thing from Li ligo as the T deck plus four $71.

Again, spec five is targeting that more tactical market.

they may have a better case and a better setup.

I'm not saying either way, but back to hyper mesh.

They discussed a number of points about hyper mesh in this Digital Rancher

video that's about nine minutes long.

One of the things that caught my eye is they're talking about.

Wanting to make something better for commercial users

or introductory customers.

They stated that often open source has too many options, and they want

something that's easier and simpler.

So not necessarily designed for the technical user.

And now I think that they are not wrong.

Open source oftentimes does get.

Not opinionated enough, that there are too many ways to skin the cat.

And new users get scared by that.

They just want someone to come in and tell them what to do and how to use it.

And if you look at how popular Apple devices are, there's clearly

a large market for just tell me what to do, so user friendly is good.

As someone who has worked under the Meshtastic banner at events,

has spoken to hundreds if not thousands of people about Meshtastic.

I definitely want Meshtastic to be user friendly.

I want it to be easy.

I want it to be something that you can give to your mom who is capable

of sending text messages and can figure out how to use Meshtastic.

We're not quite there yet.

Taking a different approach that a spec five and hyper mesh is to make it

more user friendly is not a bad thing.

The targeting commercial users, I'll come back to in a minute

though, they talk about their interface being more graphical.

But it's not clear what that means.

The only thing they show is the list of nodes around you is more like airdrop

than it is like a list of nodes.

Like you see in mesh astic.

It's still using an app on the phone or tablet.

Right now hyper mesh is clearly very early on.

It's just sends texts.

There's no other new features or fanciness.

They also opted to use wifi instead of Bluetooth for communicating

between the, phones and the nodes for a longer range, faster purposes.

But it's not really clear as to why or what benefit that is.

At the end of the day, Bluetooth is still faster than Laura, I

guess if you are transferring a lot of data, Bluetooth or wifi would

be more useful or more reliable.

These nodes that they're using are ESP 32 based, so if you've got a shitty

2.4 gigahertz antenna, it's not going to go well for range either way.

If they are talking about investigating reticulum, though it was not clear in

the video if they wanted that as part of hyper mesh or just another way to

sell hardware would make perfect sense if they're going to sell reticulum

hardware alongside Meshtastic hardware alongside hyper mesh hardware.

Also, you can use the web browser to log into these ESP

32 hyper mesh devices as well.

Though to be clear, they have effectively no user interface on the nodes themselves.

It's either the web interface or the mobile apps.

There is also no discussion of routing or anything like that at this point in time.

I tried to find more information, but.

In doing so, I found out that they will probably be forced to change their

name of hyper mesh here in the near future as hyper mesh is the registered

trademark of Altair Engineering and is a piece of 3D modeling, software or

something tangentially related to it.

So putting hyper mesh into Google or YouTube just gets you a bunch

of 3D modeling software videos.

At the end of the day, my concern with hyper mesh is that this

will be gona all over again.

Instead of building community interest off a Kickstarter, they are doing it

off Meshtastic, and then they will pivot into commercial clients, which

inevitably becomes emergency services, law enforcement, military, et cetera.

Now, to be clear, for SPEC five.

It's a great business model.

It's super lucrative.

You can look at gona.

They've been chugging away for more than a decade now, selling devices to first

responders and military and making a bunch of money, it just is potentially

terrible for the average consumer because if you buy a hyper mesh specific

device, which they're not selling today, but if you, if that does exist, it

may not be mesh astic compatible and.

They have not stated but implied that it is not going to be open source.

That means you could end up with another mesh device for another mesh that you get

left behind on because you are not willing to spend $2,000 on a new mesh node that

is this new cool hyper mesh business model because you're not a commercial user.

A lot of this is speculation.

To be clear, I'm not trying to harp on spec five.

Here I am, like mesh core, going to keep an eye on it, going to,

look at it and keep an open mind.

I just worry that community members will see this as a new cool R

alternative, spend a bunch of money on it and end up with a bunch of bricks

and without the hyper mesh software eventually becoming open source.

I would not trust it to survive.

So on that cheerful note, we are done for the month.

I want to thank you for sticking through to the end.

As a reminder links for everything that I talk about today.

We'll be in the show notes and once again, I wanna put a call out for suggestions.

, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can just comment on the YouTube video.

You can at me on B sky, or you can post in the Discord.

The links will be at the top of your show notes.

I really want to include more from the community, more cool events, more

things that your meshes are doing.

So if you are listening to this and your mesh has done

something cool or interesting.

You're also launching balloons and trying to do something

different, please let me know.

I would love to talk about it on a next month's show.

So until then, stay safe.