Goodbye To Two Character Radio Names?

🎉 Unique IDs for MeshCore Radios

After more than a year of discussion on Github & Discord, a proposal to extend visible identifiers past 2 characters has received enough support that the experimental code branch was merged by Scott Powell/RippleBiz, MeshCore’s developer, a couple days ago into MeshCore’s development branch!

Although the full unique identifiers ensure routing was handled properly, only 2 bytes were available for analysis, so it has been unclear how one’s radio transmissions actually propagated.

MrAlders0n, a key maintainer of the MeshMapper application initiated the most recent round of discussion with his proposal “to allow companion radios to configure their prefix resolution (in bytes), with a default of 2 and add a path_len to packets to store that resolution.”

To understand the issue, see Alan Dieringer’s recent post on repeater names and this well reasoned statement making the following case:

1. Coverage mapping is fundamentally broken by duplicates
2. People want to understand their mesh
3. Duplicate IDs cause real routing problems
4. Communities are going to extraordinary lengths to work around this
5. 256 IDs isn’t enough for where this is heading

The long discussion mainly occurred under these issue reports:

• Let’s fix ID collision #562
• Proposal for v2: Support variable-length path segment sizes #1083
• The Case for Expanding Repeater IDs Beyond 1 Byte #1613
• & a poll, with more discussion
• Path hash collision de-duplication #1652 (Comments by the core developer of MeshCore) with this key comment.

See this critical suggestion from two of the core maintainers, for the actual technical path forward, albeit one that breaks existing firmware.

Folks will just need to re-flash their devices to take advantage of the new routing scheme.

MeshCore repeaters in the Pacific North West, as of 27 Jan 2026 — WAY more than 256!

A somewhat analogous proposal, Add default region scope that matches any scoped packet that doesn’t match any explicitly defined scopes #1791 may well be next, showing MeshCore is alive & growing.