Home/Switching
Flash your radio. Keep your hardware.
Everything you own carries over
MeshDTN is built on MeshCore and stays inside it, so the hardware you already have is the hardware it runs on. Here is exactly what stays the same, what becomes true once you flash, and the choice you get every time you send.
Migration
No new hardware. No subscription.
Keep every piece of hardware you own. Same boards, same antennas, same enclosures, same mounts. Flash the firmware, install the app, and every node you own starts carrying for people who weren’t there — with nothing else to set up.
Ten minutes from download to first carried message.
Precisely
What carries over, and what becomes true
Carries over untouched
- Your boards, antennas, enclosures and mounts
- Your existing MeshCore contacts and repeaters
- Radio parameters — same modulation, same channel presets, same power
- Board support — MeshDTN supports 95 boards, all of them listed
- The companion protocol between a phone and its own radio
- Your costs — no subscription, no account, no license
The radio parameters are inherited deliberately. A preset nobody else runs means no community range data transfers, no third-party tooling matches, and no comparable field results.
True the moment you flash
- Every node you own becomes a carrier — no node to designate, nothing to configure
- Messages live in the phone’s store: gigabytes and a battery you charge nightly
- Nothing in transit is readable by anyone but the recipient, on every kind of traffic
- A message with nowhere to go can wait instead of failing, for up to ninety days — in Auto, the default, and in MeshDTN mode
- You find out whether it actually arrived
- WiFi and Bluetooth start carrying too — a phone alone is a full node
Know this before you flash
You keep your network
A flashed radio stays a full member of the MeshCore network it was in. MeshDTN uses stock MeshCore’s LoRa sync word, so MeshCore users see you as an ordinary node: they can text you the ordinary way, and it arrives. Every stock MeshCore message type behaves exactly as it does in MeshCore.
Carriage happens between MeshDTN nodes only. A message sent the MeshDTN way can be handed onward from one MeshDTN node to the next, but only between nodes whose owners have switched relaying on — a stock MeshCore repeater never passes carried traffic. That is structural rather than a promise: a stock radio is never named as the next hop, and stock firmware does not flood a message type it does not recognize.
What a node that has not opted in pays is one decode. A stock radio in range receives a MeshDTN frame, does not recognize it, and drops it. It never transmits because of MeshDTN.
Credit where it’s due
MeshDTN exists because MeshCore made a good place to start
MeshDTN is forked from MeshCore, whose firmware is the foundation this is built on. MeshCore contributed board definitions, pin mappings, radio driver integration and RF behavior — work that encodes bench time, not typing, and that would have been expensive to rediscover.
The mobile application began from zjs81/meshcore-open. Both are excellent projects. Every license file travels with the code, and full attribution is in NOTICE.md.