This can be apparent, however you additionally have to have a community arrange earlier than catastrophe hits, Meadors says. So, arrange anybody who you would possibly want to speak with throughout a cell and web blackout earlier than it really occurs. And, attributable to comparatively frequent firmware updates, you possibly can’t simply toss your gadget in a bug-out bag and neglect about it. However “if it is one thing that you simply really use, like for those who pull it out and use it as soon as a month, you may be good to go,” Bennett says.
Then there’s the difficulty of uncooked bandwidth. This limitation could cause points when lots of people try to make use of the community on the identical time. At a ham radio conference in Dayton, Ohio, final yr (sure, it’s referred to as Hamvention), the Meshtastic community crashed after somebody ran a program that flooded the community with further visitors, pushing the Meshtastic community to its limits.
“As a result of actually one particular person turned on this MQTT bridge, which then joined the remainder of us into this mesh in a metallic constructing in Dayton, it crashed the entire mesh instantly,” Vander Houwen says.
After this incident, Vander Houwen, Bennett, and Meadors went to work to organize for the upcoming Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, finally releasing a particular firmware for the a lot bigger occasion that Vander Houwen estimates permits “someplace between 2,000 and a pair of,500 nodes” to function on the community concurrently. A similar firmware launched forward of the 2025 Hamvention in Could drew praise from the group.
Regardless of Meshtastic’s limitations, its promise as a backup communication system—and the sheer enjoyable you possibly can have with it—continues to tug in new fanatics. The Android app alone has drawn hundreds of critiques, and the Meshtastic subreddit has grown to just about 50,000 members. Some municipalities are even hoping to launch Meshtastic networks to assist defend their communities within the occasion of pure disasters.
For Bennett, Meadors, and Vander Houwen, they’re excited to not simply see the variety of Meshtastic nodes enhance, however to see the expertise grow to be one thing anybody can use with out having to grow to be an fanatic or “analog astronaut” in any respect.
“I feel the largest factor for me too is that it’s not simply accessible from the side of the {hardware} being accessible to extra individuals. I need to make the software program extra accessible,” Meadors says. “I need to make the expertise such that I can hand this gadget to anyone and have them obtain the app and begin messaging. We have come a good distance. I feel there’s nonetheless some room to develop there.”
Up to date at 10:25 am ET, June 4, 2025: Corrected a misspelling of Ben Meadors’ surname.
