Matt, N3PAY - HAM radio hobbyist

MeshCore and NebraskaMesh

MeshCore is fun. No HAM radio license required. James W8ING and folks from NebraskaMesh.net did a wonderful job talking about MeshCore and NebraskaMesh.net at BARC in August 2026. Several of us bought equipment. I copied Dennis KC0YKN and Tim KF0TIA when I bought my Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro MeshCore LoRa Companion, OLED, 2000mAh. I'm able to sit in my basement, send a message with the MeshCore app on my iPhone to the Wio that's upstairs. From there it goes to my SenseCAP P1 Pro Solar Node configured as a room server that is also acting as a repeater. Then it spreads throughout the mesh.

route through the mesh

Both the above screen grab and the one below are from https://analyzer.nebraskamesh.net an awesome open source program called CoreScope.

Through CoreScope each node has a unique URL. My solar powered SenseCAP P1 Pro node is room server N3PAY-RS@110Pacific.

public channel is clearly not encrypted

Area HAMs using MeshCore

I was able to have Claude scrape a node names into a SQLite database. Because NebraskaMesh.net suggests HAMs put their callsigns in their node names, you can view the list of area nodes using call signs in their names here: https://payne.github.io/NebraskaMeshScraping/ham.html. It even lets you play with the database using WASM and Datasette Lite.

My favorite YouTube Playlist on MeshCore

This playlist about MeshCore is great: YouTube's The Comms Channel. I really like that YouTube channel.

Asked Claude "Start a blog entry about MeshCore and NebraskaMesh" and it generated the rest of this blog post.

MeshCore is a lightweight, hybrid-routing mesh protocol for LoRa packet radios. Nebraska Mesh is a volunteer-run MeshCore network spanning Nebraska: no internet, no cell towers, just neighbors keeping neighbors connected. It started around Omaha (OmaMesh) and has spread to Lincoln, Grand Island, and rural counties.

Radio settings

Nebraska Mesh uses these settings:

Setting Value
Frequency 910.525 MHz
Bandwidth 62.5 kHz
Spreading Factor 7
Coding Rate 8

Firmware types

MeshCore has four firmware types:

  1. Companion Radio — pairs with a phone app
  2. Repeater — typically used for Nebraska Mesh infrastructure
  3. Room Server
  4. T-Deck/T-Pager

Watching the mesh

I've been scraping to watch MeshCore activity in the Nebraska bounding box. The NebraskaMesh Analyzer is another great way to see what's happening on the network.

  1. Nebraska Mesh — About, Help & Documentation
  2. NebraskaMesh Analyzer
  3. OmaMesh — Omaha Mesh Networking
  4. Nebraska Mesh on MeshCore Ninja
  5. MeshCore on GitHub