Best practices for the SoCal Mesh

None of this is mandatory. These are the settings people on this mesh have settled on after running a lot of radios in a lot of places. The point of them is to stop the network talking over itself, so your messages get through.

If you check one thing after reading this, check your device role. It’s the setting people get wrong most often, and the one that affects everyone around you. If you change nothing at all, you’ll still be on the mesh.

Which channel to set

Start on LongFast, frequency slot 20. That’s where many of us are, and it’s the factory default. Set your region to US and a new radio is already there: LongFast with the frequency slot left alone works out to 20 on its own. For most people there’s nothing else to change.

MediumFast slot 45 is an alternate. A lot of us in SoCal do use it, and it’s faster on the air. It isn’t always strong, though, and whether it works for you depends on the area you’re trying to connect from. Try it if you can connect on it. Go back to LongFast slot 20 if you can’t.

LongTurbo slot 14 is an experiment. It is a wider 500 kHz channel that carries a little more than LongFast for roughly 3 dB less reach, and like LongFast it works out its own slot: 14. We are only starting to test it, and our guess is that it becomes the default here eventually. It needs firmware 2.7.17 or newer, and some older phone apps do not list the preset yet. Switch a radio over to it if you want to help test. Note that Meshtastic has said it is considering a new default for version 3.0 without naming which one, so treat the “it becomes the default” part as our expectation rather than anybody’s announcement.

Before you switch, look at our live map and see if there are MediumFast slot 45 nodes near you. One catch when you do: a node only turns up on a map if its owner has switched on OK to MQTT, and plenty never do. There are far more nodes on this network than any map displays, so an empty patch isn’t proof that nobody’s out there. Use the map as a floor rather than a headcount, and ask on Discord, where somebody nearby can tell you what they’re really hearing. There’s more on that setting below.

Set both the preset and the frequency slot, not just one. Type the slot number in rather than leaving it at 0, for the reason in the next section. Radios on different presets can’t hear each other at all, whatever the slot says.

We use the default primary channel settings. You don’t need a separate pre-shared key, and you don’t need to pick a channel to join the public network. Set your own keys on your own devices if you want private channels. That’s a separate thing from the public mesh.

If your settings get into a state you can’t untangle, do a factory reset and start again from default. It’s not giving up. It’s the quickest way back to a radio you can trust.

If you rename the primary channel

The default channel is fussy about this, and getting it wrong takes you off the mesh quietly.

• For the default LongFast channel to work, either leave its name alone or name it exactly LongFast. Change nothing else about it.
• Set the frequency slot yourself instead of trusting the default. With the slot left at 0, the radio works out its frequency from the name of the primary channel. So renaming the primary can move you onto a different frequency. Changing the key doesn’t. On a factory-fresh radio that calculation lands on slot 20 for LongFast and slot 45 for MediumFast, which is why it often seems fine with nothing set. Typing the number in is what makes it reliable.
• Slot 20 is the LongFast value for the US region. It isn’t a universal “put it back to 20”. If you’re joining MediumFast slot 45, the slot is 45. Other regions use different numbers again.

You may also see advice to add LongFast as a secondary channel called LongFast with the key AQ==. Be clear about what that does. Every secondary channel shares the primary’s preset and frequency slot, so this won’t let a MediumFast radio hear the LongFast mesh over the air. It only decrypts LongFast traffic that reaches you some other way, like over MQTT. (AQ== is the published default key, not a secret of ours.)

Device role

This is the setting people most often get wrong, and a wrong role hurts everyone around you rather than just you.

• CLIENT is the best all-round setting, and the default. If you’re unsure, use this. It’s also what you want out in the backcountry, where your radio might be the only thing another node can reach.
• CLIENT_BASE is for a node you’ve mounted somewhere with a view, like an attic or a roof, that should prefer your own nearby nodes. This is the current role for that job. Older guides, including the one this page grew out of, said to use CLIENT for a “hop-out” node like this. That advice is older than CLIENT_BASE.
• CLIENT_MUTE is for a node that shouldn’t relay anyone else’s traffic. Think of one sitting right next to a stronger node of yours, or one of several you keep in the same place. It still sends and receives your messages, and still reports its node info and position. It isn’t the automatic answer for anything that moves. A radio out on a hike is more use as CLIENT.
• ROUTER is only for a node somewhere genuinely strategic, meaning a mountain peak rather than a tall building. Meshtastic now says to avoid it unless you’ve worked the placement out with the rest of the mesh. There’s also ROUTER_LATE, for filling in a dead spot you know about.
• REPEATER: don’t use it. It usually causes problems for the mesh around it, and it’s been deprecated since firmware 2.7.11.

You’ll see a couple of other roles in the list, CLIENT_HIDDEN among them. If you don’t already know you need one, you don’t.

Hop limit

Leave it at 3. That’s the firmware default, 7 is the maximum, and Meshtastic’s own line is that 3 really is fine. You’ll see 3 to 5 recommended around here, and some bigger meshes do run their infrastructure a little higher.

Turning it up isn’t the free win it looks like. Every extra hop is another copy of your message on the air, so past a point you’re buying congestion instead of reach. A badly placed node can also pick up a packet and spend its hops before it gets anywhere useful. People then raise their hop count to compensate, which makes things worse for everybody. If your messages aren’t landing, a better antenna or a better-placed node will do far more for you than another hop.

Broadcast intervals

Chatty nodes are the main cause of a congested mesh, and the defaults are chattier than a permanent installation needs. Times are in seconds.

Infrastructure nodes, meaning anything mounted and staying put:

Setting	Seconds
Position	86400
Telemetry	3600 to 7200
Node info	86400

Mobile nodes, meaning anything that moves:

Setting	Seconds
Position	900
Telemetry	900 to 1800
Node info	86400

A node bolted to a roof doesn’t need to announce its position every fifteen minutes. It hasn’t moved.

Two things those tables can’t tell you. Smart position broadcast is on by default, so a moving node reports its position more often than the interval suggests. Treat the number as a ceiling for a radio sitting still. Also, Meshtastic’s own defaults have shifted since these recommendations were written: telemetry now defaults to 1800 seconds and node info to 10800, and firmware from 2.4.0 onwards stretches the intervals out by itself once a mesh passes about forty online nodes. Where our number is shorter than the firmware’s, go with the longer one. Nothing breaks if you do. The mesh just gets quieter.

MQTT, and getting on the map

Two different things get run together here, so it is worth separating them.

OK to MQTT is permission. Switching it on uploads nothing by itself. It tells any gateway node that hears you that it is allowed to pass your traffic on to an MQTT server, and that is what puts you on the community maps. Leave it off and gateways are supposed to skip you, so you stay off the maps even when people around you can hear you perfectly well. You do not have to run a gateway or set up MQTT yourself to appear on a map. You only have to allow it.

Uplinking is the other half: running your own node as a gateway that pushes what it hears up to a broker. That takes a set of settings of its own, and they have their own guide: How do I uplink to MQTT. Follow that rather than guessing. The topic string is case sensitive, and there is one setting in there you specifically should not turn on.

So if you want to be visible on the map, turn on OK to MQTT. If you want to be one of the nodes carrying everyone else’s traffic up to the broker, that is uplinking, and it is the other guide.

What actually makes a radio get heard

The settings above are the easy part. This is the part that decides whether anyone hears you, and most of it is physics rather than configuration. Thanks to @Coopersmith, whose field notes this section is built on.

Receiving is easier than transmitting. On a handheld with the antenna it came with, you’ll see nodes appear in your node list long before those nodes can hear you. That list is good news. It proves your settings are right and your receiver works. It doesn’t prove you’re getting out.

Antennas and height are the name of the game. A better antenna makes the most of the signal you have. Height buys you line of sight. Those two will do more for you than any setting on this page.

Line of sight matters enormously at these frequencies. Glass and plastic are roughly transparent to your signal. Almost anything else costs you: walls, terrain, buildings, trees, a hill between you and the next node. These radios don’t have much to spare either, since a typical one transmits around 22 dBm, a fraction of a watt. Give it a good antenna and a clear view, though, and the range is surprising.

No confirmation doesn’t mean it wasn’t received. Because of how the mesh works, the person you messaged may well have got it even when nothing comes back to you, including when your radio says it hit max transmissions. Silence is ambiguous rather than bad news.

Every hop lowers your odds. The more nodes your message has to pass through, the less likely you are to get a real two-way conversation going. That’s the practical reason the hop limit advice above is a low number instead of “as high as it goes”, and the reason one well-placed node beats a distant one.

Where to ask

Come to Discord. It’s a friendly, helpful group, and it’s the fastest way to get a real answer about your own area from someone who’s on the air there.

Introduce yourself when you arrive, whether you’ve got your first node in your hands or haven’t bought anything yet. Plenty of people turn up to ask what to buy. That’s a perfectly good reason to be there.

Where these settings come from

Meshtastic’s own documentation is the authority on what each setting does. Start with the introduction for how the network fits together, and watch Meshtastic Routing Issues and Deployment Scenarios if you want to know why roles and hop limits matter as much as they do.

This page is where the SoCal Mesh best-practices notes live now. They started out in a separate repository. If something here is wrong or has gone stale, say so on Discord and we’ll fix it, which is a good deal easier now it’s on the site.