MeshCore in New Zealand

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scottjpalmer

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#324401 4-Apr-2026 14:20

Here be a dedicated MeshCore thread before the next MeshCore posts appear in the Meshtastic thread.

MeshCore has taken hold in parts of NZ - Auckland/Waikato/Bay of Plenty has a pretty impressive mesh now.

Anyway, discuss at your leisure.

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#3477889 4-Apr-2026 14:24

Are any of the Wellington or Marlborough MeshCore folk here?

marshalleq

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#3481229 16-Apr-2026 08:08

I've been looking into mesh core in Auckland lately, I've not been able to find settings relevant to auckland and my attempts to find the mesh from within the CBD have been fruitless. If I am to believe the meshcore map there is an insane number of nodes. Where does one go to find what the settings should be?

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#3481246 16-Apr-2026 09:15

What LoRa band should I be looking at getting?

The little things make the biggest difference.

scottjpalmer

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#3481247 16-Apr-2026 09:15

marshalleq:
I've been looking into mesh core in Auckland lately, I've not been able to find settings relevant to auckland and my attempts to find the mesh from within the CBD have been fruitless. If I am to believe the meshcore map there is an insane number of nodes. Where does one go to find what the settings should be?

Clicking on those nodes around Auckland should show you NZ Narrow is the setting to use. That should be all you need.

Don't expect other nodes to appear in your app instantly. Leave it running for a few hours, ideally 24 plus. Send a message in the Public channel and you should see it say how many repeats are heard. If it just says Sent under your message it probably hasn't reached a repeater.

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#3481248 16-Apr-2026 09:16

Shindig:
What LoRa band should I be looking at getting?

AU 915MHz

scottjpalmer

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#3481251 16-Apr-2026 09:30

There has been a bit of chat on the Public channel in Wellington.

A Repeater has gone up in Wairarapa in the last few days with some subsequent chat on that also.

No link between Wellington and Wairarapa yet.

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#3481275 16-Apr-2026 10:54

Hi. I am Pukekohe based and believe there is a repeater on Pukekohe Hill and the Franklin Amateur Radio Clubrooms.

I myself will be receiving my companion any day now and will look at also installing a solar repeater

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#3486809 2-May-2026 18:40

Im in the tron.

I have the WIO Tracker L1 Pro and companion app.

Pretty good connections to Auckland, BOP, and other places.

I need to build my own node though

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richms

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#3494908 23-May-2026 21:29

Well I have cleared enough stuff in the junkroom to get to the abandoned meshtastic radios and re flashed 2 of them to meshcore and I am actually seeing something happen on it which is more than I ever saw with meshtastic.

I had to manually add myself and my repeater to the map in the app, not sure how to get that updating automatically but will see if I can find the one I had put into a solar lights panel to flash before we get into the permanency dark and wet part of the year.

Richard rich.ms

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#3494911 23-May-2026 23:31

richms:

Well I have cleared enough stuff in the junkroom to get to the abandoned meshtastic radios and re flashed 2 of them to meshcore and I am actually seeing something happen on it which is more than I ever saw with meshtastic.

I had to manually add myself and my repeater to the map in the app, not sure how to get that updating automatically but will see if I can find the one I had put into a solar lights panel to flash before we get into the permanency dark and wet part of the year.

the @ in your name probably causes some of your issues, it definately makes the chat a little quirky..

The global map is opt self-upload, it's rarely actually used though tbh. There isnt really an automated way to upload nodes to it and is often out of date.

over the last month or so most nz meshcore users have moved over to using the map I host, with observers in a large amount of the network.

NZ MeshCore Analyzer

Seems alot of meshtastic users have started moving across, i was pulling statistics yesterday and growth lately has been very rapid.

Currently Auckland coverage goes all the way up into whangarei and down to toupo. Repeaters are currently being attempted to be put in place to connect up north Plymouth, Napier and Wellington. Nelson is also working on reaching across the straight too!

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richms

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#3494928 24-May-2026 13:15

I have renamed them. Now to dig out all the other mesthastic gear and see what is flashable Any action on 433MHz at all?

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#3494943 24-May-2026 15:20

I'm really intrigued by this, and I have a couple of questions.

How is this different from Meshtastic (if it is indeed different)?

I live in a bit of a dip (north end of Whangarei), with minimal line of sight to anywhere far afield. According to the maps above, there are a couple of repeaters 1-2km away, but not in direct line of sight. Is this liable to be a problem?

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richms

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#3494944 24-May-2026 15:25

Its different in that people are actually using it because it will actually work, meshtastic is best for small clusters of people that want to communicate in an adhoc manner when they are all mobile, because it floods the mesh. When the mesh gets big because its popular you just end up with the hidden node problem where everyone talks over everyone else.

10-20 people - meshtastic fine. 100s of people - meshtastic falls over. When I last looked there was something happening in meshtastic to start to do routing of stuff but I lost interest as there was noone within reliable radio range of home.

Richard rich.ms

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#3494945 24-May-2026 15:27

richms:

I have renamed them. Now to dig out all the other mesthastic gear and see what is flashable Any action on 433MHz at all?

nope, everything is at NZ narrow, think it's only gisbone that have a different choice and thats used heavily there and due to the particular usage they do not want to join up to the rest of the network.

I had a look at 433 for some bridge links, but the conditions on that frequency range really make it less than ideal.

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#3494950 24-May-2026 15:46

Gurezaemon:

I'm really intrigued by this, and I have a couple of questions.

How is this different from Meshtastic (if it is indeed different)?

I live in a bit of a dip (north end of Whangarei), with minimal line of sight to anywhere far afield. According to the maps above, there are a couple of repeaters 1-2km away, but not in direct line of sight. Is this liable to be a problem?

Whangarei has a fairly decent set of deployments, Uber actually have repeaters on a handful of their sites and they have expressed interest if it's utilized to deploy on other sites too which is pretty cool.

The typology there makes it a little rough, it's much like my location in the Waitakere / Bethells beach valleys. Infill sites become a little more ideal.

We have outgrown 1 byte significantly in the north island, the move to multibyte is essentially complete. There is one or two key repeaters that unfortunately are rather difficult to get to so they are lagging behind on updates.

the biggest benefit with meshcore over meshtastic is companions are intended to be mobile, repeaters are not. so routing can still be fairly variable to a companion but across the mesh it should be pretty consistent. public channels are still flood routed so the gains arent seen nearly as much there however the choices in the frequency, bandwidth and SF is notable better than what meshtastic was using.

With the concept of owl repeaters becoming well known, deploying repeaters has gotten pretty rapid.

Here is one that I need to stick back up, it's been upgraded to a 2 cell battery and has been in testing for awhile.

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