GearHack: Revision: 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. If you want to know more about the Meshtastic radio, check out our "What is a Meshtastic Radio?" 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".

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.

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.

Position

In the "Position Config" settings, the only thing you 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" only after you are ready to share your location with the world (see "Sharing Your Location" section below).

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.

Sharing Your Location

Based on the basic configuration above, you are not currently sharing your location. If you want to share your location with a small group of family and friends, please check out this "" article. If you want to share your location with the rest of the world, follow the instruction in this section.

Tap the fourth tap (from the left) on top of the Meshtastic app. You'll see the channel page. "LongFast" is the default public channel. Tap the "Edit" button and then tap the "LongFast" channel. Turn on "Uplink enabled" and "Position enabled". If you are comfortable with your "Precise location" being shared, turn that on. Otherwise, turn it off and set your location precision to a value between 148 feet and 14.5 miles.

Warning
Keep in mind that even with "Precise location" turned off, if you stay in one spot and someone, stalking you, collects enough data points on your imprecise location, that person can still pinpoint your location.

When you are done with the channel setting, tap the "Save" button. Finally, tap the "Send" button to send the channels setting to your Meshtastic radio. Now your radio is ready to send your location. But it's not doing so yet, until you configure it to use the built-in GPS, your SmartPhone's GPS, or a fixed location. See the next three sections to determine how you would like to provide your location.

Use the GPS in Your Meshtastic Radio

If your Meshtastic radio has built-in GPS, then you can enable it with the following steps:

Use Your SmartPhone's GPS

Now, if your Meshtastic radio doesn't have a built-in GPS, then you can use your phone to provide the GPS coordinates. Follow these steps:

Use a Fixed Location

A good way to provide a proximity location to your actual location is to use the fixed position method. Follow these steps to share a fixed location with your Meshtastic radio.

Reference
You can determine the latitude and longitude coordinates using a online map product, such as Google Maps. You can find the altitude of various locations using a search engine, such as Google Search. See "Related Links" section below to conveniently get to these online products.

Older Revision of Configuring Your Meshtastic Radio

Configuring Your Meshtastic Radio