New Firmware Alleviates Repeater Name Collisions

🎉 Unique IDs for MeshCore Radios

After more than a year of discussion on Github & Discord, Scott Powell/RippleBiz, MeshCore’s developer, resolved the issue of only having only 256 unique repeater identifiers. With nearly 2,000 repeaters in the Pacific Northwest it had become hard to identify which repeater relayed a message.

Instead of 1 byte (1 byte = 8 bits = 2^8 = 256 possibilities), the new scheme allows also having 2 byte (2^16 = 65,536) and 3 byte (2^18 = 16,777,216) identifiers - plenty for the future.

However this comes out of a limited length string, so what gets shortchanged? The number of hops gets reduced, so messages won’t travel as far.

For 2-byte addresses, messages can go out 32 hops. Messages using 3-byte addresses limit the number of hops to 22. Another point is when you type in repeater IDs to trace a route, you’ll need to type in 6 digits for each repeater in the path, an inconvenience. So for the Pacific Northwest, we’ll likely use 2 bytes.

In the short-term, realize that 1 byte prefixes are 100% compatible with everything released, while 2 and 3 byte prefixes are only compatible with radios that have been upgraded to MeshCore 1.14+. So upgrade your nodes, but keep 1 byte prefixes until enough people have updated that you can get your messages out. Changing routers to 2 or 3 bytes early will only impact the repeater’s advertising.

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

Other MeshCore 1.14.0 firmware enhancements

• multibyte path hash support
• new ‘auto add max hops’ preference
• new radio Automatic Gain Control (AGC) reset implementation
• HeltecV4 power fixes
• RAK3401 power optimizations
• Heltec Tracker V2 power fixes

See GitHub for details.