March 2025 - Balloons, new hardware and protests, oh my!

It is that time again, another month's voice of the mesh.

I'm your host Jon, and we're here to talk about everything Meshtastic

that happened in March, 2025.

Normally I'd start off with some news from the Meshtastic blog, but it seems like

the team is heads down getting 2.6 from the tech preview towards a stable beta.

We'll talk about that in a bit.

But first, let's cover some other news headlines that I've

found around the interwebs.

First thing in the news is Semtech, the makers of the popular SX 1262

LoRa Transceiver, have announced a new LR 2021 LoRa plus transceiver.

It got covered by a few news sites and it was certainly posted about in

the subreddit in large part because as part of the press release, they noted

that the transceiver supports LoRa Gen four, Amazon Sidewalk, and Meshtastic.

Amongst other tools and technologies it supports.

So this looks like it could possibly be the successor to said popular SX 1262.

Based on the press release, there are a few major changes of notes compared to

the older chip, and that would be first off, a broader frequency range support.

The SX 1262 is sub gigahertz only, so it tops out at about 930 or so megahertz.

Versus the new LR 2021 supporting up to 2.4 gigahertz IE, the same

band as you find wifi and Bluetooth, which is also an unlicensed band.

Now, 2.4 gigahertz will allow for a higher throughput, but at a much shorter range.

So this will have maybe less use in Meshtastic.

But it'll be interesting to see what happens with it.

The LR 2021 does support higher data rates.

It also has support for more modulation schemes.

Though there is slightly less sensitivity and a slightly higher

current draw, and it has the same 22 DBM transmit as the older chip does.

Keep in mind that.

No one has one of these yet that has commented publicly, so we have

no idea about how it'll work in the real world . For end consumers.

End users.

This is a little bit like the announcement of a new processor from Intel or AMD.

It's cool, but it will likely be a while before we see this

chip in Meshtastic devices.

Next in the news is a story from WTXL of Tallahassee, Tennessee, and the article

title is monticello Council considers new emergency communication system proposal.

Now, since you're listening to this on voice of the mesh, you will not be shocked

to know why this is of interest to us.

The subheading reads, the Jefferson County Community Emergency Response Team aims

to enhance communications during crisis.

A new system called Meshtastic would ensure first responders stay

connected when it matters most.

I think the funniest part of the, this article though, I suggest you read it.

I'll, I'll just quote.

He explained how these small solar powered devices, which cost about a hundred

dollars each, are attached by drone to the top of water towers throughout the county.

And I just laughed when I read this because if you're part of a local

mesh, you have probably had someone discuss the concept of attaching

a Meshtastic radio to a drone.

Then flying it up somewhere, be it on the top of a light pole or a

water tower or something else and surreptitiously leave it there.

Maybe most local meshes are not doing this in a approved fashion,

but it's just really funny that this CERT plans to do exactly that.

I look forward to hearing more about how their deployment goes.

And I'll, I'll keep an eye on this story.

And finally in the news is something that's fairly common, but I

thought it was worth calling out.

The Fayette County Amateur Radio Club hosted a meeting featuring Meshtastic,

and this has happened in many places.

I know of several, at least three or four different Bay Area amateur radio

clubs that have hosted similar meetings about Meshtastic and had presentations

given to their members about what Meshtastic is and how to use it.

I gave one of these presentations myself to a local amateur radio club.

But I think this is a great example and it just comes up because their

site showed up on my news feeds.

This is a great way to expand your local mesh.

If you don't have a lot of Meshtastic usage in your area, find your local hams.

Find your local amateur radio club.

They probably will be interested.

It runs along the same lines.

There's a heavy overlap between amateur radio operators and

Meshtastic, so they are a great place.

To find more people to help plant nodes.

In the next section, we're gonna talk about the firmware.

There have been four firmware releases in the last 30 days,

and that would be 2.61 alpha.

2.62, 2.63 and 2.64.

And normally I talk about each release separately, but since the current

2.6 line is more working on stability than features, I figured I'd just

talk about them as an entire group.

Keeping in mind that while 2.6 is out of technical preview, it's still a

very rough around the edges, alpha.

If you want a stable experience, please wait for the beta.

All of these four releases are heavy on bug fixes.

There's just bug fixes after bug fixes.

They're doing little tweaks and fixes and optimizations for the

new 2.6 features like the New Ink hud, and the new Meshtastic ui.

My hope is that when the beta rolls out, it will be a really

smooth and good experience.

If you're looking for stability, wait for that beta.

As exciting as the new 2.6 features might be if you have upgraded or

do plan to upgrade, do remember that it will wipe your device.

Beyond all the other major features of 2.6 that have been talked about in the past.

What notable items are in these for more releases?

First is support for a bunch of new hardware and that includes the Ebyte

E 77 dev kit, the Seeed XIAO NRF 52 kit, the mesh Toad, USB LoRa board,

the Elec Crow, think node M1, and M2.

And several of these I'm gonna talk about in the new hardware

segment in just a moment.

There's also support for a number of new sensors, including the LTR

390 ultraviolet sensor, DPS310 High Accuracy Barometer added support for

the rain gauge data from the already supported Ecowitt WS 85 weather station.

Support for the Healthtech HRI-3621 Industrial sensor Hub.

Finally, the LS20031 GPS receiver, like I said, a ton of new sensor support.

The final item that really caught my eye was one noted line around

wifi OTA or over the air updates.

There's not a lot of details today, but it looks like there may be a possible future

where there is support for doing IP based.

Updates of ESP 32 devices.

So if you are putting a node up on the roof on top of a building somewhere

where it's generally difficult to access, one of the biggest problems

about Meshtastic today is that the firmware's moving very fast and updating

that firmware on those inaccessible nodes is challenging to say the least.

This may be a solution because your node is presumably already on the network.

So wifi, OTA or IP based OTA will allow you to update it remotely.

That being said, if you are putting a node where it's less accessible but has

regular power, I would strongly recommend going to take a look at the Femto Fox Pro.

I talked about it last month.

I had one at that point in time.

It's now been installed on my roof.

Specifically so that I don't have to climb up there and plug in

the USB cable to my radio to get it updated on a regular basis.

But in addition to that, I have two more sitting on my desk.

I'm not sure what I'm going to use them for, but they are just such great little

devices for a long-term installs that I couldn't pass up getting a few more.

So in the new hardware segment, we have a bunch of items obviously

to talk about for hardware.

I'm gonna start with the Seeed XIAO series.

There's actually two different units here.

The XIAO ESP 32 S3 and weo weo, WIO, SX 1262 Kit.

And the second one is the exact same thing, except it uses an

NRF 52 chip instead of an ESP.

Now, the ESP 32 edition has been around for a few months, but it seems like

they're just starting to become regularly available whereas the NRF edition is

brand new and being NRF based is going to be significantly more battery friendly.

Both devices are the same form factor.

They're about thumbnail sized.

They will be great for little tiny nodes that you wanna hide in all

sorts of little random places.

The XIAO series, I don't know if it's XIAO or WIO, but that series

of devices from Seeed has a series of shields available for purchase that.

Hooks up to accessories and grove ports and whatnot.

But the biggest thing about these is that they are probably

the cheapest possible Meshtastic radio node that you can get today.

The XIAO ESP 32 S3 kit is $10, and the NRF 52 kit is $14.

I will say based on some reviews online and simply what to expect

out of a $10 kit, the antenna is probably not the greatest.

If you just want to use this for playing with a couple of nodes around

your home, then that'll be fine.

But if you actually want something that.

Is a good strong node for repeating, for hiding places in the solar node somewhere.

Really expanding the mesh.

Get a better antenna.

You can get half decent antennas on Amazon for a few bucks.

It is really not expensive to buy a decent 3db antenna.

The second piece of hardware.

We're talking about this month is actually not a Meshtastic device, but you'll

understand it's the Lily Go T deck Pro.

Now, because the T deck and the T deck plus were Meshtastic devices,

everyone assumed that the T Deck Pro would be a Meshtastic device also.

It looks somewhat similar to the previous T deck.

It has the same form factor, but this time it uses an E ink display for better

battery life, but unfortunately still uses an ESP 32 and they combine that

only with a 1500 milliamp hour battery.

Likely it has not the greatest battery life.

Maybe a day if you're lucky, but probably 12 hours at most at this point in time.

It's not a supported Meshtastic device other than the fact

that it does have a LoRa chip.

It also has 4G.

So this feels like it's an attempt at something more akin to an UN

phone where it's a not exactly a phone, but still in that same realm.

I'm not entirely sure what LilyGo's target market is for it, but I look forward to

seeing what people do with it being ein.

It would use the ink hud, so maybe it won't be too bad for Meshtastic.

Maybe it'll be built in portable MQTT uplink device.

Who knows?

The next on the list for new hardware is the Rak Wireless Wis

Mesh repeater system with solar panel and high capacity battery IP 67.

This is a $300 all-in-one solar node.

Now, before you freak out, this is actually an excellent price

for a business or a municipality.

Rak advertises it as professional grade, and I would have to agree

yes, A DIY solar node is cheaper.

There is no doubt about that.

You can build a really quite good solar node on your own for

probably half that price, but if you are a business, a municipality,

maybe you are that CERT team.

From the news segment and you just need certified professional devices that are

ready to go, that are IP 67 that come with a warranty that come with a company

backing them in order to get them past maybe, a city or county inspectors.

This is a really good option and it's really not that expensive for,

again, a business or municipality.

If you like the idea of a solar node and don't wanna spend that much money,

there have been an absolute ton of solar nodes posted on Reddit this month.

Plenty of people showing off the cool things that they have done, the the

different ideas, the different takes on it, how they're doing it, what hardware

to use, and how much it's costing them.

So if you want a solar node that's professional.

You've got a good option for that now, and if you just want a DIY node to

sit on your roof like I do, ah, you can do something for half the price

and throw it in an ammo box and use a sealed lead acid battery instead.

Finally, in the new hardware category, we have the Elecrow

M1 and M2, starting with the M1.

This is a $40 device.

It's NRF 52 based and uses the SX 1262 LoRa module.

It has an e ink display, a rotary switch, 1200 milliamp power

battery, GPS and real-time clock.

It looks like a tiny walkie-talkie.

It gives me lily go t echo vibes.

Maybe built a little bit more tactical, hardcore.

If you get the case without the case, it's a very competitive.

Almost ready to go device.

$40 is equivalent to the T 1000 E, though the T 1000 E is

of course coming with a case.

This M1 possibly only downside is that the case is $18.

So buying it already to go with the case brings the price up to almost $60 USD,

which is steep for a case if you ask me.

I will say that based on what they have there and their own claims 48

hour battery life seems entirely reasonable for this device.

And it seems like it'll be a pretty good option for a everyday carry node.

Now, for the Elecrow M2 this is a completely different take.

It's $22.

It uses an ESP 32 within SX 1262.

It has an OLED display and only a 1000 mah battery.

It is similar in style to the M1 but again, there's no GPS.

There's no real time clock.

It's only gonna have a battery life if I did the math correctly

of a maybe seven hours if you keep the screen off the entire time.

So this is clearly targeting the more cheap and cheerful people, the ones

who want a different option than a Heltech V3 for really cheap entry.

But again, we just talked about the Seeed XIAO kits, which are even cheaper.

You could go either way.

These are, to my knowledge, the first devices from Elecrow.

So it's an interesting entrance into the market for sure.

Finally, we get into the social posts for the month.

The first highlight is a little bit of self-promotion.

The San Francisco bay Area mesh user group did a live stream of a synchronized,

dual Meshtastic, high altitude balloon launch, or at least that was the plan.

One balloon went up relatively on time.

It went to an altitude of just over 30 kilometers or 100,000 feet in altitude.

It had two Meshtastic radios on board.

One Heltech V3 with the Geiger counter and one Rak wireless wis block.

The two different radios was because one was operating on medium slow

and one was operating on long fast.

Just as a fun factoid, the Geiger counter hit a maximum of two microsievert an hour.

For context, a dental x-ray is five microsievert.

This balloon was recovered.

Unfortunately the second balloon ended up going up six

hours late, and it was leaking.

And they had to strip off basically everything for

payload because of the leak.

So it didn't last that long, so it only turned out to be one Meshtastic balloon.

This was streamed on my channel on YouTube.

I was the orchestrator of the, the live stream, though I had nothing to do with

the actual balloon launches themselves.

So if you're interested, the entire unabridged nine hour

live stream is available.

At some point in time, I will put out a more condensed highlight reel.

From Reddit, we have a post by the ORI of self titled, deployed my

first 3D printed, pole mounted, direct attach station G two today.

As noted, it's basically an entirely 3D printed case that mounted directly

to the pole in a very round fashion.

It was an interesting and different design that I had not seen before.

And this user lives in Florida, so they were designing their node pole

set up with hurricanes in mind.

What would be best able to handle high winds without failure?

It just goes to show that you can build a mesh for your emergencies in advance,

designing for your particular needs and use cases, whether that happens to be

earthquakes or fires, although I don't know of any fire rated Meshtastic radios.

So maybe keep them somewhere where they won't get burned but hurricanes as well.

Another post by mam Persat titled Went to Meshtastic presentation at local ham club.

Guy asked anyone live on a hill and I live on a hill.

He gave me a custom made solar and powered rack chipset node.

I put it on a poll.

I am now mesh and just like I was saying in the new segment.

This is a great way to plan to node grow mash Talk to your local ham community.

It's a great place to not only find like-minded people, but as someone

at their ham club realized it's a great way to find people with

geographically advantageous locations because at the end of the day geography

is probably going to make the most difference for your mesh success.

If you're just getting started, it's all about geography.

The next Reddit post was by z Miguel titled Meshtastic 2.6, map

Titles with Higher Zoom Levels.

If you're not aware, the new Meshtastic user interface that comes out with 2.6.

When you use it on a T deck, there is a map page, but it is blank by default.

It is just dots around you.

But you can stick map tile images on a micro SD card and into the T deck

so that you actually have a map.

The Meshtastic instructions do not contain particularly detailed maps, though,

because I believe they're the entire globe and they want to keep the size pretty low.

So z Miguel has posted a breakdown by geography and the

size required for each geography.

So continental United States Europe, Asia, et cetera.

And the size is required.

So if you're looking for map tiles with a little bit more detail to them

this is a great post to chase down for your T deck or similar devices

running the new user interface

Next from Reddit was not from the Meshtastic.

Subreddit but actually r/cyberdeck and it was posted by TER Anomalous one and the

title was Mesh Deck I made for Meshtastic Remote Administration, deployment,

maintenance and firmware recovery.

It's also a toolbox.

It was in fact a very cool looking 3D printed toolbox.

He includes a cheap Android tablet, a Rak Wis block.

All the tools and gadgets and wiring that you would need to do maintenance

on mesh nodes and also, connect to them.

Do firmware updates for this.

Use an Android tablet is a really great option for something small that

allow you to recover devices that have otherwise entered in unexpected state.

So for those of you running a bunch of alphas, eh, this might not be a bad idea.

Next is a very simple post by boring material.

1891 titled, welcome to Coconut Wireless.

It was a screenshot of the Hawaiian mesh with the farthest nodes being 400

kilometers or about 250 miles apart.

And now.

This was not single hop distance, it's, using the mesh.

To my previous point, a couple of social posts ago, geography, line

of sight makes a huge difference.

Basically the Hawaiian Meshtastic user group has been putting nodes up on

volcanoes, when you're doing that, your limiting factor for range basically

becomes the curvature of the earth.

Maunakea on the big island I apologize if I butchered that pronunciation.

That volcano is almost 14,000 feet tall.

That gives you almost 150 miles to the horizon.

Of course, you could go even farther than 150 miles.

You're talking to another radio on another mountain, or in this case another volcano.

So again, if you are in an area without mesh coverage or you're looking to

improve it, getting that altitude, getting nodes up higher is gonna

make more difference than almost anything else you could possibly do.

And the final post from the social section is by MIBG 92 and

the title is Nodes at Protests.

The user was attending the largest protests in Serbia history.

Was using Meshtastic to communicate with their wife in part because the

government was shutting down cell service because they controlled the

telecom companies apparently during these protests to disrupt the protestors

ability to communicate amongst themselves.

Now, I don't know anything about Serbia's politics.

I don't know what's going on there.

I have no commentary on the matter.

As I live in the US I have.

Our own political situation to deal with, however you

believe that should be handled.

But I think that this is an interesting take on a common reframe for why to use

Meshtastic, and that's for situations where you might not have cell service.

Now, whether it's a government instated cell shutdown or not.

Cell service often gets overloaded when you have too many people in the

same location that's not designed for.

So yes, you can have 40,000 people in a sports arena and your cell phone

service works fine because they have cell towers every hundred feet or whatever

it is just absolutely maxing out the cell coverage in that particular space.

For a downtown, it's probably not designed to handle 10,000, 50,000,

a hundred thousand people in a few blocks all crammed together.

So regardless of whether you have an authoritarian government or live in

a country where your government is heading towards authoritarianism, you

can still have cell issues in a protest

anywhere, anytime that there's a lot of people gathering together, you

might have trouble with your cell phone service and Meshtastic is a

great option to use as a backup.

Now, apparently Meshtastic is not super popular in Serbia at this

time, so there's no real mesh.

Although MIBG 92, our poster noted that they did see a few other nodes pop up.

Even if you're not using the mesh, just a couple of nodes could help

you in case you do get separated from the people you care about.

To wrap up the month, even without any big blog news headlines,

it's been a really busy month.

As usual, I want to thank you for listening.

Especially for those of you who made it all the way to the end of the podcast.

As a reminder, I would love to hear from you.

Leave a comment on YouTube post at us on Blue Sky message on Discord,

be it feedback, comments, critiques, news stories, or even self-promotion.

If it's Meshtastic related, I would love to hear about it.

Obviously I've been mentioning the Bay Area mesh because that's.

A group I'm a member of, but I would love to hear from other local meshes

and what you are doing and what cool things are going on in your local

regions because I think the users of Meshtastic do a wonderful job of learning

from each other if we hear about it.

So until next month, stay safe and keep on meshing.