rns.recipes

Anyone running an RF-only Reticulum mesh with 20+ Rnodes? I'm planning a deployment at that scale and trying to find people who've actually operated one in the wild — would love to hear what works, what doesn't, and what surprised you.

Specifically interested in LoRa-only or LoRa-with-a-few-TCP-bridges setups, not the testnet hubs

Thanks!

I am kinda doing this but all the nodes are connected to a central backbone interface, I don't care as much as intra-lora communication than just providing access points. I have two bases with Rnodes connected to real host computers but I'm planning to just use the hectic nodes as RTNodes for the majority of the Lora interfaces. I've already written paragraphs of text in some other posts so I'll just link that instead of repeating myself https://rns.recipes/forum/help/high-bandwidth-vs-high-range-lora-tradeoff-for-setting-up-a-large-swarm-of-rtnodes

You probably want to figure out some frequency that isn't being used by near by meshcore nodes cause the interference might jam both you and anyone trying to meshcore. I've only just started setting up my local network so I'll be able to provide more details as i get a few more nodes set up.

Are you connecting them to the rest of the reticulum network out of curiosity?

Thanks for the quick reply! I don't have the hub and spoke model here, so I have an existing Meshtastic network that I want to "convert" over. I was excited about the routing ability, but the more i dig into it, the more difficult it is, so I see why MT uses (mostly) flood and MC uses (mostly) "manual" routing.

In regards to connecting to the rest of the network, I was going to keep them quite isolated for now, because reticulum is growing and the flood of traffic would drown out the little bandwidth it has. Later, I may implement a filter to only pass traffic i want on the Lora side.

Rob wrote:

In regards to connecting to the rest of the network, I was going to keep them quite isolated for now, because reticulum is growing and the flood of traffic would drown out the little bandwidth it has. Later, I may implement a filter to only pass traffic i want on the Lora side.

Just in case you meant connecting to Reticulum's internet backbone as well, just wanted to note in that case you could set:

• The TCPClient interface as mode = boundary
• The LoRa/RNode interface as mode = gateway

and that should prevent the concern you've mentioned! (Backbone announces drowning out local LoRa)

Rob wrote:

I was excited about the routing ability, but the more i dig into it, the more difficult it is

May you expand on exactly what the difficulty is?

welo wrote:

Rob wrote:
> I was excited about the routing ability, but the more i dig into it, the more difficult it is

May you expand on exactly what the difficulty is?

so I have a lab setup of nodeA and nodeB and "T" transport node. both A&B are connected to RNS and can communicate with each other. when I introduce T and the links are not symmetrical eg. A->T->B and the return path is B->A messages stall. If the return path is the same as the forward path it works. I read the logic where Mark mentions the announce as a indicator of the best path and load balancing, but It seems something is not working for me. so if A and B are totally isolated and T is in the middle everything works.

Rob wrote:

welo wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> > I was excited about the routing ability, but the more i dig into it, the more difficult it is
>
> May you expand on exactly what the difficulty is?
>
so I have a lab setup of nodeA and nodeB and "T" transport node. both A&B are connected to RNS and can communicate with each other. when I introduce T and the links are not symmetrical eg. A->T->B and the return path is B->A messages stall. If the return path is the same as the forward path it works. I read the logic where Mark mentions the announce as a indicator of the best path and load balancing, but It seems something is not working for me. so if A and B are totally isolated and T is in the middle everything works.

Maybe the thread "Thoughts about unidirectional connections (especially in LoRa networks)" is of interest for you as well.