Meshtastic is an open-source project using low cost LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without little or no communications infrastructure. It’s a portmanteau of Mesh and “fantastic”.
I found it shared on Facebook, which lead me to the subreddit post, which lead me to reading more about it and even finding Lemmy communities and local groups!
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtastic
I also made sure to check if this wasn’t a hail corporate thing. And I also felt like I missed the era of homemade radios. So this is exciting for me!
We have a 14 node mesh in our town, I have never met any of the other owners. Wait till you learn about ATAK
What is ATAK?
He said wait.
I guess I assumed they’d go off and search on their own…
Here’s a field-friendly primer tying together CivTAK/ATAK, MeshTastic, and HALO—three technologies that often orbit the same conversations about civilian coordination, comms, and mapping.
CivTAK / ATAK
What it is:
- ATAK = Android Team Awareness Kit. Originally military, now with a civilian fork called CivTAK.
- Core feature is a shared map with live team positions, annotations, and collaboration tools.
- Functions as a situational awareness (SA) platform—imagine Google Maps supercharged with multiplayer coordination.
Strengths:
- Handles offline maps, topo layers, GIS data.
- Plugin ecosystem (search & rescue tools, drone integration, wildfire overlays).
- Flexible networking: LTE, Wi-Fi, radios, or mesh.
Civilian Role: Used by SAR teams, disaster relief groups, event organizers, and outdoor adventurers.
MeshTastic
What it is:
- An open-source mesh radio project. Small LoRa (long-range, low-bandwidth) radios form a network to pass messages between nodes without cell towers or internet.
- Think of it as walkie-talkies for text data—your phone connects via Bluetooth, and MeshTastic devices relay the packets.
Strengths:
- Long range in rural/open terrain (tens of kilometers with line of sight).
- Extremely low power usage, can run for days on a small battery.
- Ideal for grid-down, remote, or off-grid comms.
Civilian Role: Hiking groups, neighborhood emergency preparedness, off-road expeditions, community mesh networks.
Connection to ATAK:
- With plugins, ATAK can use MeshTastic radios as a data transport layer to sync positions and markers even without cell service.
HALO
What it is:
- HALO (Hazardous Awareness and Location of Operations) is a TAK server implementation designed for civilian organizations.
- Basically the “cloud hub” for CivTAK/ATAK, handling data distribution, group management, and persistent mapping.
Strengths:
- Acts as the glue—users running CivTAK/ATAK connect to HALO for centralized comms.
- Provides persistence: maps, chat logs, annotations survive beyond a single session.
- Supports mixed networks—cellular users, Wi-Fi, and mesh nodes can all sync via HALO.
Civilian Role: Deployed by NGOs, SAR orgs, and local emergency groups to keep coordination structured.
How They Fit Together
Picture a search-and-rescue mission:
- CivTAK/ATAK is the app interface—team members see each other’s positions, hazards, search grids.
- MeshTastic provides the off-grid comms backbone if cell coverage is down—nodes bounce data until it reaches everyone.
- HALO acts as the mission control hub, syncing everyone’s data and maintaining the “source of truth.”
Together, these tools give civilians a command-and-control capability once limited to militaries—but at low cost and with open-source/community-driven energy.
Civilian Ops Tech Primer: Quick Comparison
Tool Role What It Does Strengths Typical Use CivTAK / ATAK Platform (the app/interface) Android app for real-time maps, team tracking, and collaboration. Powerful mapping, plugins, works with many networks. Search & Rescue, disaster response, event coordination, outdoor group safety. MeshTastic Transport (the radio network) Open-source mesh radios using LoRa to pass text/position data phone-to-phone via Bluetooth. Works off-grid, long range, low power, cheap hardware. Off-grid messaging, team position sync in no-signal areas, neighborhood comms. HALO Server / Hub Central TAK server for syncing users, maps, data, and managing persistence. Acts as “mission control,” supports mixed connections (cell, Wi-Fi, mesh). NGOs, SAR teams, emergency groups needing a shared source of truth. How They Work Together
- CivTAK/ATAK = the cockpit (what you see and interact with).
- MeshTastic = the radio link (how data moves when cell towers fail).
- HALO = the headquarters (where all info is stored, managed, and synced).
In practice:
- A SAR team in the mountains uses MeshTastic radios to pass position updates.
- Each rescuer’s phone shows the shared map through CivTAK/ATAK.
- Back at the operations center, HALO aggregates everything, letting coordinators direct the search with a reliable, persistent map.
I’ve gone down parts of this rabbit hole (reading, not implementation). Wish I could guarantee that I could set anything up (including just setting up Meshtastic nodes in fun places) without getting arrested for setting up what can only look like an espionage infrastructure network to the government.
My man!
You should start a sub-lemmy, would subscribe.
Meshtastic is nice. I have one node already, debating myself if that’s enough or if I should get/build a solar node.
I was very fortunate that there’s an active community in my city. I can reach nodes 50km away without a big antenna.
Currently working on a sideproject using meshtastic and conventional LoraWAN:
We have dozens of smaller streams here that are somewhat flash flooding prone, often with extremely locally limited precipitation. (The last time I took damage the cell was 500m wide and the damage area was only 1.2km long. We received almost 80l/m² in one hour) This makes monitoring and warning extremely difficult and the official water level probes by the government are too far downstream and only show larger issues - for the people living on the smaller ones the damage is done - for some it might also be too late to warn them off upcoming backwater as the communication options are often difficult for them.
The idea is to use no-contact water level probes deployed to strategically useful locations and maintained by locals to monitor the level and flow of the water, transmit via conventional LoraWAN and meshtastic and inform both the local communities and official emergency response channels of the levels.
Currently still in an early stage but we are seeing more interest in that and it might end up as an official research project by a local university. (If anyone has any recommendations for cheap reliable sensors let me know…this is the current main issue - the whole node needs to be under 250€ in the end)
Have a node up in the attic which is bridged to my wifi and into my Matrix server. Of course, in the event of a catastrophe the usage will be direct bluetooth connection from a phone instead.
The range is impressive, my node connects to others several tens of kilometers away.
I’ve got a node on my roof. Solar powered RAKwireless. I can connect using my phone over bluetooth.
Can you give some details for how you bridged it to Matrix? That sounds interesting. (I have a matrix server too)
I believe this is the bridge I’m using: https://github.com/jeremiah-k/meshtastic-matrix-relay
This is great! Looks like they just added BLE support too. Thanks!
That is incredible! You’re doing what I’m just fantasizing about!
Any tutorials or videos on setting something like this up?
Is there som rough map of where this stuff exist?
https://meshmap.net/, but you have to opt-in for your node to show up there. There are ~20 nodes in my vicinity, but only 5 of them are on meshmap.
Four in my city, I didn’t expect that 👍🏻
Is there a community to subscribe to somewhere?
meshtastic@mander.xyz is the largest, but there are a few. Just go to Communities, select “All”, and enter “meshtastic”.
You saw that post of the guy on the bus as well then?
I’m curious now. Can you share the link?
Yeah! It was on Facebook when I saw it though and led to the Reddit post.
This will be fantastic during the apocalypse and we lose Internet.
Too bad I’ll have lost the Internet so I won’t be able to learn how to get the equipment and set it up, until it’s too lateWe see “-tastic” used as a suffix so often that it seems genuinely odd to see it explicitly explained.
Fun if you are travelling and go to a new town/city with an active user base.
That’s the dream! Any experiences youve had?
Meshtastic is cool, I haven’t gotten into it. It’s all license free. I say that because some other radio based hobbies need a license (GMRS and ham).
Folks looking into it, many of the devices use Bluetooth to communicate with a phone or computer so you don’t need to type messages directly on the device, but the technology is still off grid. There are totally self contained devices you can type on directly. I just wanted to mention that because seeing “off grid” then seeing them pairing with phones can be confusing. It’s truly only to enter messages and keep devices a little cheaper and easier to use.
