How To/Documentation
Recommended Settings

Recommended Settings

There are a lot of settings available in the Meshtastic client and it is not always clear what the optimal settings are for any particular situation. Below are some settings that members have tried and recommended as a good starting point.

  • User: This one is pretty obvious. Pick something unique so that other station can easily identify you when in a conversation. If you have multiple nodes that might be used in different situations (eg; Home, Portable, Work, etc) you might consider using your name and the device type, for example: “Homer home”, “Homer portable”. It’s really up to you.

  • Channels: At a minimum you’ll want the default channel “LongFast” as channel 0. If you decide to join the PVEC’s P V Open channel you may have that as channel 1. Within the channel settings we recommend that you leave “Uplink enabled” and “Downlink enabled” Off. If you’re interested in sharing your location, you would need to turn “Position enabled” to On and then decide how precise you want other users to view your location.

    • Uplink enabled: Off
    • Downlink enabled: Off
    • Position enabled: Off, unless you wish to share your location

  • Device:

    • Role: If you only have one device set this to “Client”. If you have a few devices and one of them is positioned to get the best reception you can set that node to “Client” and the other nodes to “Client Mute”. You almost certainly do not want to use “Router” or any of the others roles listed unless you have a special case that you want to handle. Router might seem intuitive for an outside node at your house or even a relatively tall building, but that would still be best served by a role of “Client”. A good explanation of the roles can be found here. “Router” should be reserved for really tall peaks with a 360 degree view of the surrounding area - think mountain tops. If you have a tall hill or rooftop on a peak, “Router Late” might be a consideration, but try “Client” first. There is also a “Repeater” mode, but this mode sends no telemetry data and does not appear in traceroutes. If you use this mode you will not know if the node goes offline, battery/solar status or how well it contributes to the mesh. If you are concerned about airtime usage, setting reasonable defaults for telemetry and nodeinfo packets should be sufficient.
    • Rebroadcast mode: ALL
    • Nodeinfo broadcast interval: 3600 or more - this will alert other nodes to your nodes presence on the mesh, but it is not the only time it does so - your node is also sending telemetry packets and will send nodeinfo packets when another new node joins the network. Anything less than than this is unnecessary airtime used up.

  • Position Config:

    • Position broadcast interval: 1800 or more for a mobile node, 86400 (one day) for a stationary node.
    • Smart position enabled: You can turn this on and it will only broadcast a location if your location has moved by some minium distance. I would start with the defaults if you are sending your position, otherwise the settings there do not have any effect.
    • Use fixed position: If you have a stationary base station that you want to appear on maps, you can set this to On and enter a set of coordinates. Optional.
    • GPS mode: If your node is equiped with a GPS receiver you would enable it here to make use of the GPS.

  • Power Config:

    • Enable power saving mode: Off

  • Display:

    • If your device has a display, you can adjust the settings here - they will have no effect on the send/receive capabilities of your node.

  • LoRa Config:

    • Use modem preset: On

    • Modem preset: LONG_FAST

    • Frequency Offset: 0.0

    • Region: US

    • Hop limit: 4 or 5. There is a lot of discussion around this topic, but as a practical matter for this area you should never need a hop limit higher than 5. The hop limit is the number of intermediate nodes that your transmission can pass through excluding your node and the receiving node. For example, if you are node Bart and you are sending a message that you hope is received by node Lisa a setting of 5 would traverse:

      Bart -> node1 -> node2 -> node3 -> node4 -> node5 -> Lisa

      If you look at the [/network/map/](traceroute map) there aren’t any nodes that are more than 5 nodes apart. Anything higher just eats up extra airtime.

    • TX enabled: On, obviously :) But.. sometimes turning it off is handy if you’re switching out an antenna or want to test another node and you don’t want this one interfering.

    • TX power: 30

    • Frequency slot: 20 (this should get set automatically by the modem preset above.

    • Override Duty Cycle: On, but has no meaning here in the US. In other parts of the world the region setting will force the radio to observe an airtime conserving duty cycle between tx/rx.

    • Ignore incoming: If there are nodes that you absolutely don’t want to hear from, you can add them here. Otherwise leave empty.

    • SX126X RX boosted gain: The SX126x series of chips can increase Rx sensitivity for a tradeoff of slightly less power consumption.

    • Override frequency: Leave at 906.875Mhz

    • Ignore MQTT: Off - turning this on would ignore nodes whos traffic make it onto the Mesh using an MQTT relay.

    • OK to MQTT: This is a personal preference. If you set this to On, other stations can relay your broadcasts (telemetry, messages, etc) to an MQTT server where they may show up another mesh in another region or on various Meshtastic map sites.

  • Bluetooth: Defaults with your own PIN

  • Security Config: You should have an automaticallty generated public/private keypair. Make a copy of these somewhere safe! If you need to reflash your node and start from scratch these values will get regenerate automatically. Any nodes that had cached your previous public key will now show a broken lock icon for your node and will not be able send/receive direct messages with your node. This behavior lasts until they delete your node from their list or it ages out from being off the air. If you back up these values you can restore them after reconfiguring your node and the lock will remain green. You can leave the options as defaults for now.

  • MQTT: Off

  • Telemetry:

    • Device, Environmental, Air quality, Power Metrics: 3600 - this is how often your node will transmit these metrics to the mesh. Unless you really need them more often once an hour is probably enough.

Any settings not mentioned above can safely be left at their default values.

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