It's time for a chat...

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Welcome back to the official Meshcore channel, guys. Hope everybody is doing well. It's been a while since the last video on this channel. So much has happened. One of which is Meshcore has now passed over 35,000 users who have these are users that have added themselves to the map. So there's likely more out there. So yeah, you can see this the coverage across the world now globally is just extraordinary. So thanks to everyone for their support of Meshcore. It's been absolutely great to see the way these meshes are growing in different countries. So anyway, let's dive in to some new cool Meshcore stuff.

[00:00:33]So, one of the most exciting things to happen lately is the new Mesh OS app.

[00:00:37]So, this is the new Mesh OS app running on my Samsung Fold 7. And yeah, it basically focuses more on the chat experience. So, the everyday user of Meshcoy. So, you can see you've got all your chats in one place. You've got kind of little previews under here as well, showing you a bit more like, you know, what you'd expect from kind of a social uh messaging app. So, it's very very kind of easy and nice to use. You've also got this um really nice looking map here, which shows at the moment is showing just a huge chunk of the UK coverage. And uh there's lots of other map features in here as well. So, you can kind of do repeater find um which is really cool. If you go up like the top of a hill or something like that, you can just find all the repeaters on the map. So, this app is basically geared towards the kind of the everyday Meshcore user who's wanting the very slick messaging experience. It'll even show you previews if there's any here.

[00:01:30]It'll even show you pre web previews of of kind of links and stuff like that.

[00:01:34]And of course, Mesh OS is available on the T deck as well. It started out on the T deck and we've kind of, you know, gone into the Android and iOS side of things. So, yeah, the Mesh OS app very very centered around the social experience. Um, you can even do Bluetooth messaging now. So you can actually form a Bluetooth mesh B mesh with like multiple smartphones. Um and you can just use that as a mesh. You can see here at the top here um we've got two nodes connected, you know, in this little um Bluetooth mesh I've got here.

[00:02:01]Um so yeah, I'm going to cover more on this, you know, another time because it's quite a quite a big feature. Um you got voice messages on here as well. So you can do voice messages over um beerly. So, it's perfect for like, you know, if you're maybe like in a music festival or something like that, you've got friends that don't have Laura radios, you can just use B back to back.

[00:02:21]So, this is something I'm going to I'm going to talk about in another video coming soon. So, yeah, of course, we've got Liam's app here, the original um Liam Cos Meshcore app, and this one, you know, has every feature that you could possibly imagine. It's the go-to for the admin side of things. Um so, yeah, there's two different sort of takes on the different apps you can use, but why not just use both? they will both actually run at the same time on the same smartphone. So, it's pretty pretty cool. So, the next thing I want to talk about without getting too in-depth and complex about this um is a new feature that was rolled out a little while ago called multibite. And it's confused quite a few people. I get quite a few questions about this crop up um now and again. And basically, there are some settings in Liam's app and there's obviously some settings in Mesh OS that allow you to um do multibite. The easiest way to put this is you don't really need to do anything if you've updated your repeater. If your repeater's on the latest firmware, you are good to go for multibite. That's the easiest way of explaining that. And you don't need to make any extra settings you can do with the repeater, but I'm not going to go into that. Um, now the thing about multibite is it makes tracking routes a lot more easy like path. So if we go to like the map here, actually we'll go to um one of the messages here and we'll just tap on this one here and we'll do path analysis. Now you can see here this path here is quite short. There's only a few hops in there.

[00:03:42]But I know this is quite accurate because I know most of these repeaters here or this Harford Omni one's mine and where I know that my repeaters um gets a signal from where. So I know that this is pretty this is realistic. But it could actually be a complete it could be completely rubbish because um there's only 256 slots uh for repeater IDs in the one bite mode. Bear with me. Um, so you end up with this situation where lots of you're going to get lots of clashes with like there's like 3,000 repeaters on this mesh at the moment. So the chances of you having a duplicate are as shown here. So you see that little those little orange um rotators there basically that little one out of 13 that's showing there's 13 repeaters with the same one byte ID. So if you just send out a normal message it will be in one bite mode. If you go to the Mesh OS app and you want to send a multibbyte message, you can do that by just going up here path hash size, change that to two bytes, go. Now you're in two bite mode and basically your messages will be a lot easier to to kind of work out where they come from. I mean this is purely like for analytics really. It doesn't serve any other purposes at all. But if we say sort of afternoon um you know here afternoon guys on air send a genuine message. What will happen here is you'll see a tick pop up and you'll see the 2B. So it shows you two bytes and that will mean that you have sent out a two byte message. Now if someone sends you a message with with um two bytes or three bytes, you'll also see that 2B or 3B in there. And when you go to do the path analysis, it'll be a heck of a lot more accurate because you'll see um you'll be using they'll be you'll be basically tracking a message with two bytes or three bytes and there's not very many duplicates on two bytes at the moment and definitely there's like none on on um on there. So you can see I've actually managed to get across to to Brian here on two bytes, but he probably won't know that because he's using the other app and that doesn't doesn't show the the bites in the message bubbles at this moment. But um yeah, so we can just, you know, look at his path. Um I've done some sort of kind of algorithms with this to make it select the most likely repeaters it's going to be. So even though there are 12 repeaters with the same ID here, um this app will actually kind of select the best one, the one that it kind of knows um that is most likely to be the one that it's it's using. So it is quite intelligent in that way, but it's not going to be perfect because it can't be there's no way around it. So that's that's another kind of feature um you know kind of a little bit of an explanation on how that kind of works.

[00:06:27]But the main thing to know is if you're using Mesh OS, you can easily set um the path size there. And obviously you can do scope as well. Um and change it back to to one bite there. And then you know it's quite quite simple in the um in Liam's app. It's under um experimental settings and then you can change the path size, but it changes it kind of for everything. And you know that's that's how it does it on there. Right now, lastly, before I go, before this video gets too long, I'm hoping I'm going to be able to just do a lot more of these sorts of videos um going forward um to explain things and and kind of talk about what's happening in Meshcore. Um but yeah, the the next one is a bit controversial because um we've been having some spam issues. Not the spam as in the the meat, not that. No, we've been having some issues where um things have just been getting a little bit crazy recently. And I think a lot of you in the in the UK and beyond will probably relate to this. Um, lots of kind of test messages being sent out on on test and like lots of bots replying.

[00:07:32]You know, this is a great space for experimenting, guys. And don't get me wrong, I like all of the the kind of different things that are cropping up, all the little kind of open- source bots and projects and things. I think it's good, but there's a place there is a place for it. And the trouble is when you're using channels, I don't think a lot of people realize that these these messages that you send out on the channels just will just flood the entire country presently because no regions or anything like that are set up. That's going to be something that's obviously uh people going to maybe have to start get their heads around. That's very complicated to to work out, but or should I say very it's a difficult one for to coordinate with a with a mesh that's run by many many many people.

[00:08:16]Anyway, um there's lots of other tools, things like these kind of mesh mapper and mesh rank and all these other things that have kind of cropped up lately and there's something happened recently like with the war driving um thing. And it it's just crazy to me that you you you're not really thinking that you're just spraying the mesh out with hundreds and hundreds of messages and it's going to just, you know, bring the whole thing to a standstill. What you've got to remember is this. The these are simplex radio channels. what one actually one radio channel um to send you know however many thousands of people that are actually kind of communicating. So you've got to treat this with a bit of kind of respect and you've got to treat this with really know what you're doing.

[00:09:00]If you if you're into bots and that's your thing, great. There's other frequencies you can use to play around with that. You don't have to be kind of spraying, you know, public messages or test messages that go propagate across the whole country. you don't need to be doing that. Um, and the problem is because there are a lot of bots out there. I've been seeing this situation where somebody types test and then basically like about five bots reply test received and then they show a load of one bite ids which we know are completely there's no point there just absolutely no point in that at all. Um, so yeah. So yeah, sorry for the mini rant on this. Um, but it has led to people kind of, you know, getting a bit frustrated and kind of, you know, they're trying to communicate and just have fun chatting on the mesh and there's all these kind of all this weirdness going on like strange numbers appearing on the mesh on different channels and or lots of activity going on and nobody knows what what's happening, what that channel is about.

[00:09:58]This is natural growth stuff that's that's happening. But it is it is it is it can be a problem and it's even led to some people like you know um creating spam blocker firmware and things like that to actually kind of mitigate or block out um certain channels. So yeah anyway anyway end on a positive note.

[00:10:16]You might have seen this. This is my um V4. So currently my node of choice if anyone cares um is the Heltech V4. I like the V4 because it just especially with this antenna like one of the these are gizons I think they're called. But anyway, there's lots of interesting antennas popping up now. Um copying this same sort of uh design. Um so yeah, this is a Heltech V4. It is inside an Alleycat uh pager case. I I'll leave the link below. I can't remember what it's called. And I've done like a little carbon fiber kind of backing. I've got this backing plate for the 3D printer.

[00:10:52]So yeah, I'm still 3D printing cases even though there are devices now you can you can buy for mesh core. Um but yeah, so that's that's what I'm using at the moment. My node of choice. It is really good with this antenna on it. And even though it has got an LNA, um it's fantastic. Like it still it still works perfectly with this sort of antenna. Now there isn't really a lot of repeaters I can't hit. If I take this out and I just, you know, hold it there or put it on a table or something like that, I can get into my repeaters from inside, you know, buildings, cafes, things like that when I'm out and about. So, my companion node of choice at the moment is is that Heltech V4 um with the the Alleycat um pager case. It's just brilliant. There's a 2,000 mAh battery in there. um the energy saving firmware as well which just makes this you know last ages is is pretty um is pretty extraordinary. Um one thing actually I will say another thing I'll say about Heltech V 4.3 um there's some weird issues with the 4.3 at the moment. Um and I think there's some I think there's probably some PRs to to solve this. Maybe it's been solved in the dev branch or something at the moment. But um I if you try and if you get one of these from Amazon, they're pretty easy to get a hold of. Now, a Heltech V4.3 um it probably won't work. It probably won't transmit if you use the if you just go on to the um.co.uk Flasher and and go that route. Um it probably won't work because I think there's just an issue. But once the dev firmware gets once the other bits gets merged, it should it should work. So I'm going to test that. I was meant to do that before doing this video, but anyway, that is that. Um, TD Deck's still going strong.

[00:12:36]There'll be some more updates for this.

[00:12:38]I've got some plans for this. The, you know, the app's taking a lot of time to sort out. So, yeah, there's going to be some more updates on the T deck. It needs a little bit more more love from me. So, um yeah, apologies if you've been waiting for that. Um, it's going to happen. And, um, what else have I got on the desk here? Some gigantic um, whip antenna, which which works pretty well as well. Anyway, guys, hope you enjoyed this one. And um yeah, happy meshing and I'll catch you next time.

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