Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.

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NoiseBert69 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).

Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.

Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)

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soldeace an hour ago | parent [-]

Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4

	▲	NoiseBert69 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We are not seeing a correlation between channel saturation and/or alien non-related stations. IMHO MT has a fundamental algorithmic flaw when it comes to dealing with very unreliable and lossy links.