Meshtastic Setup Tips
🛰️ Standard Meshtastic Setup and Naming Convention
To keep our Meshtastic network organized, efficient, and easy to identify, we’re adopting a standard setup and naming convention for all nodes operating within the W8PAR network.
🔧 General Setup Guidelines
- Flash the latest stable Meshtastic firmware on your device
- LoRa Config -> Region: US (915 MHz)
- LoRa Config -> Preset: Long Range – Fast for balanced range and data rate
- LoRa Config -> Hop Limit: 3
- User -> Is Licensed: Yes
- Device -> Role:
- Client or Client Mute for handheld/mobile nodes
- Client for tower or fixed installations
💡 Additional Suggestions
- For tower or fixed installations:
- Device -> Broadcast Interval: Set to one three hours
- Device -> Position: (disable all but elevation) to fixed, broadcast six hours
- Device -> User: Set the Unmessagable flag:
- As of 2.6.11 this can only be set in roles Router or Repeater. So to enable this, but have your role as Client, set your role to Router and save (and wait for reboot), and then change your role back to Client and save. The flag is persistent.
- Mobile Config -> Telemetry:: Enable power telemetry once an hour as required
🏷️ Node Naming Convention
Use ALL CAPITALS for short names to make nodes easy to recognize across the mesh.
| Type | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
| QTH | QTH | Stationary node at your home or main tower site |
| HT | HT01 | Handheld or portable node (e.g., Heltec) |
| MB | MB01 | Mobile unit installed in a vehicle. |
| Tower Site (non-QTH) | 39, RH, etc. | Use site-specific identifiers (e.g., 39 for the 147.39 tower, RH for Red Hill) |
This makes it easy to tell if a node is a home base, mobile, or tower-based relay just from the short name.
📡 Channel Configuration
Below is the current list of recommended channels for our regional network.
Each serves a distinct group or function while maintaining interoperability.
Note: the Key Size is Empty for all channels.
| Channel # | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Primary Channel | Default channel used for general mesh communication |
| 1 | W8PAR | Main Parkersburg Amateur Radio Club network channel |
| 2 | WC8EC | Wood County Emergency communications group |
| 3 | W8HH | Marietta Amateur Radio Club network channel |
| 4 | AREDN | Integration for AREDN-linked nodes |
Hello, I am KE8DAC. I moved to Marietta. I am interested in putting up a QTH node and a mobile node. Any help would be appreciated. What hardware are you guys running?
Thanks and 73,
Bret
See the solar node build page (https://kb.w8par.org/?p=148). There are a variety of Meshtastic supported portable/mobile units available. We typically push the Heltec v3, because they are cheap and they work. (https://a.co/d/dcAJ8TH)
I have a couple Heltec V3’s I bought a couple years ago but have never seen any activity in Parkersburg. I heard folks on the repeater recently talking about setting up a mesh in the area but didn’t get many details, so I checked out the PARK website and found this meshtastic page. Looks like the decision was made to use the licensed mode so that’s probably why I never saw any nodes. My question as I configure my nodes as licensed, is what name should I use as the primary channel? I was trying to set them all up as shown above but you can’t have spaces and there aren’t enough characters allowed to put “Primary Channel” for the primary. As I understand it the names have to match or you won’t be able to communicate with other nodes.
So you don’t modify that default primary channel at all. Just add the others listed. Might be worth flashing the firmware to get out any changes you’ve made and go at it fresh. The Android and iPhone apps call that default public channel different things, but they are default and remain unchanged.
Ok, I read that to mean that is what we should name it. I reflashed with a full erase and install and then set up the options as described above. I didn’t change the primary name but I did blank out the PSK field for the default along with the secondary ones I added. Let me know if that is incorrect but I thought since we’re using licensed mode we had to take the encryption keys out.
You shouldn’t have to touch it. When you enable is licensed mode it disables all that automatically. Now the android app does behave differently from the IOS app. I’ll have to defer further guidance to someone that has set these up on android.