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Configuring Your Meshtastic Radio

In this article, we will walk you through the configuration of your Meshtastic Radio. Unlike the Meshtastic reference document, this article will attempt to help you get your radio running, rather than detailing every single options.

Cross-Reference
Before following the instructions in this article, your Meshtastic radio needs to be paired to your SmartPhone. If you haven't done that already, please refer to our "Pairing the Meshtastic Radio with Your Bluetooth SmartPhone" article.

When you launch the Meshtastic app for the first time, you will be presented with the following user and region screen. The user name and region will be unset.

Before you do anything, be sure that the "Provide phone location to mesh" is unchecked. Or you may be letting the entire world know your precise location right off the bat.

Next, change the region to your location. For example, if you are in the United States, set your region to "US". The region controls the frequency your LoRa communicates with. Therefore, it's imperative that you set the correct value.

Now you need to set a name for your radio. Once you are done, the app will send the changes to the radio and cause it to reboot. After the radio has rebooted and the Meshtastic app reconnected, pull down the three dots on the top right and select "Radio configuration".

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Radio Configuration

You will be presented with the following menu. We will only go through a few of these menu items to get your radio up and running.

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User

In the "User Config" settings, you can change your full radio name. But what's more important is its ability to change the short acronym. The app comes up with the short name for you. If you have a desire to change it, do so here and press the "Send" bitton to send to the radio.

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Position

In the "Position Config" settings, the only thing yiu need to worry about for now is the "GPS mode" setting. In this article, we are using the Heltec V3 board as the example. And Heltec V3 doesn't have a GPS. The default setting is "NOT_PRESENT" which will check for one constantly, draining battery. Since we know the Heltec V3 doesn't have a GPS, we will set it to "DISABLED". If your radio has GPS, you are welcome to set it to "ENABLED".

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Start Communicating With this basic configuration, you are now on the default public "LongFast" channel. As soon as your Meshtastic radio finds another node, you are on the mesh network. When you send out a text message on the "LonFast" channel, everyone on this public channel on the mesh network will get your text message.

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Sharing Your Location Based on the basic configuration above, you are not currently sharing your location.

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