Pioneer Valley Mesh Network

MeshCore

MeshCore is the predominate mesh technology in the Pioneer Valley. There are a few well placed repeaters operaing in the area placed by a local users (thanks Paul and Kevin!) and we’re able to reach 300 or more nodes from Maine, Eastern MA, RI, CT and even a couple in NY. To get things rolling the Meshtastic Turkey Hill Router Station (pvmesh.org (Turkey Hill)) and the R2D2 bot hardware (pvmesh.org (Leeds,, MA)) have been repurposed as MeshCore repeaters. Some maps showing the nodes, traffic and coverage area are available pvmesh.org MeshCore Map and the New England Analyzer. Unlike Meshtastic, the more MeshCore repeaters out there the better, so consider adding a repeater too.

If you’re here you probably already know a little bit about Meshcore so we won’t repeat that here. There are plenty of online tutorials on how to flash a device to use MeshCore. For the Pioneer Valley area you should be setting your radio settings to the “USA/Canada (Recommended)” preset (910.525MHz, BW=62.5kHz, SF=7, CR=5). You also want to go into the “Experimental Settings” and set your “Default Path Hash Size” to 2 bytes on your companion device. If you are setting up a repeater, the experimental settings are not displayed so you need to set the path hash size via the “Command Line” option. Enter the “Command Line” screen and use the command “set path.hash.mode 1”. You can display the current value with “get path.hash.mode” to confirm. A value of 0 is for 1 byte, 1 is 2 bytes and 2 is 3 bytes. 2 bytes (mode=1) is the current standard in New England.

You should see some chatter in the Public channel, but there is also a #wmass channel for local discussion. To add this, click the 3 dots menu, Add Channel, Join a Hashtag Channel. There are also channels for #ct and #ma-mesh that be may of interest. You can interact with the Western Mass bot in #test or by DM to “wmass bot”.

There is some recent interest in developing a region scoping plan for the New England area and the great folks running the New England Mesh Netwok have been soliciting input on the topic with discussion on their Discord. To learn more about how scoping works, check out the MeshCore blog post on the topic.

Meshtastic

Meshastic is still fairly popuplar in the Pioneer Valley, but most interest has moved to MeshCore. You can see local Meshtastic nodes on our Meshview Map. Meshview replicates most of the functionality that the custom pvmesh.org code was performing (messages, node lists, telemetry, etc) so the custom code has been retired and this site simplified.