First, Battle Creek Mesh Network is just the name I’ve given this project—nothing official about it. I got interested in LORA radio communications and Meshtastic in December 2023, and after a couple of days of learning from YouTube videos and my research, I purchased the first two nodes, Heltec V3 LORA boards from DIYmalls on Amazon.
They came as a 2-pack since I realized that just purchasing one would be rather dumb if I wanted to test the technology to see if it was a viable communications alternative to conventional cellular communications. At the time, the boards were almost $60 shipped (probably due to the holiday season), and they took a few days to get from California to my house.
Thoughts on the Heltec Boards
These two boards are still in use every day. One stays in my backpack and the other in the car. Since then, I’ve repurchased the 2-pack as it is a pretty good deal twice, giving me six nodes total as of this article. I’ve also acquired a T-Beam and a Rak Wireless Wisblock, but prefer the Heltecs for a few reasons:
- Small Size – Measuring in at 2 inches by 1 inch, I velcro’ed the boards to small, thin power banks I’d picked up at Walmart on Beckley Road a year or so ago. I then taped the antennas to the side of the powerbank. This made it easy to toss in the backpack or coat pocket and I was (and am) very happy with this setup.
- Long Run Times – I have a large number of power banks I’ve collected from over the years. The Heltec V3 will stay on for over a day on a 2,000mAh charger, and about three days on one with a 5,000mAh output. The current Walmart power bank I use is the ONN 8,000mAh Power Bank which costs about $10 each. These have the nodes running around four or five days straight.
- Reliability – Once powered up, the node is a “set and forget” thing. You don’t need to ever pull it out since all the interaction is done on your mobile phone anyway. I set the OLED screens on the Heltec (and T-Beam) to blank out after 10 seconds to save even more power, and frankly, the only time I ever look at those screens is when I am showing the node to someone else that’s interested in it.
I’ve decided that for day-to-day activities, it’s easier to stuff one of these smaller devices in my bag or pocket and go than it is to take one of the larger options. In my case, I don’t pull the node out anyway, and it just does its thing.
Thoughts on the Mesh
The Battle Creek Mesh Network is just me and the people I know at this point. The fact that Meshtastic is designed to be private and secure with each family or group of people using private channels to chat doesn’t lend itself well to a community where many people, even those outside your friends’ group can join, well… It’s not ideal. Building a public network of nodes would take a lot of work and money, and as just an individual, it’s not something completely realistic unless other people in the Battle Creek area get wind of this project and want to join. Probably not going to happen, but I have decided to set up a node that runs the default settings after flashing it from the computer. This node will be the first of the BCMesh Nodes that anyone can chat with. All you need to do is flash your node with the Meshtastic firmware, and see if you can reach my node. It will be named “BCM1” (with other nodes following this naming convention) and is set on the default “LongFast” channel that every Meshtastic device starts with.
If you just leave everything as-is, and you see my devices (or others), you’ll be able to chat with us. Of course, if you think about it deeper, you’ll need a set of Nodes for private communications with your family and friends, and another set of notes (or just one, at least) to communicate on the Battle Creek Mesh Network.
Use Case? Maybe None.
So the other question that people have is what kind of situations would you use something like this Mesh Network in? Since it’s similar to those 2-way talkies, but text messages rather than voice, it probably has about as much usefulness as regular 2-way radios.
Where things get interesting is when there are a bunch of nodes in your area, such as the network I am working on around Battle Creek. Even if one of my nodes is not a part of your channels or network, it will still relay your messages. Same with vise versa. Nodes cannot decrypt the messages if they are on different networks, but will relay the communication in its encrypted format to the intended receiving node that can decrypt the message. Theoretically, your message could hop through a bunch of other nodes to get to the recipient, thus making your range much farther. The beauty of this technology is that a normal person who owns a node cannot decrypt any message that originates from a different channel (group). Sure, I bet the government could, but doing nefarious things with these devices was never on my list, and though the encryption is nice, I didn’t care about it since all anyone would see is messages from my wife sending me to the store before coming home from work to pick something up for dinner.
The draw for me is that this is another way to keep a line of communication open. HAM radios are an excellent go to (and many HAMs are already using Meshtastic), but in my family, no one but me was interested (even remotely) in studying for the test and becoming a licensed operator. That’s the barrier of entry factor I mentioned on the homepage. Ideally, if there was a situation where you needed to communicate, and no one else was a HAM operator, you’d be stuck with trying to find a different way of getting the message across.
Meshtastic devices, as I’ve said before, don’t need a license to use, nor do you have to learn anything new beyond flashing the device, and that’s as simple as plugging it into your computer and pressing a few buttons on a web page. Everyone these days knows how to text message, and most people know how to pair their phone with a Bluetooth device. That’s what makes this solution a better fit for my family and friends.