How to get connected
Come as you are. You do not have to be a radio person, and you do not have to do this in one sitting. A pocket radio and a phone are enough to say hello. If you can put something up high later, you help everyone else hear farther. Either one is a real contribution.
1. Get a radio
There is no wrong first radio, only a few honest tradeoffs. A MeshCore or Meshtastic board can be built for around $35. The RAK WisBlock starter kit is the one we point friends toward: a fair price, strong battery life, and easy to find at radio shops or on Amazon. Plan on your own battery, a case, and a better antenna than the one in the box. We can help you sort those pieces if the names feel like alphabet soup.
A Heltec V3 or V4 is the gentler price, around $25. The compromise is battery life: hours, not the week-plus a RAK board manages on the same cell. Fine for trying this out. Less ideal as the radio that lives in a bag.
If you would rather skip the screwdriver, the shop has nodes that are already built and flashed by people here. Prebuilt radios also show up on Etsy and eBay, often from about $60. Read the listing with us in mind: a low price is sometimes a case only, with a poor antenna and no radio inside. Anything sold for Meshtastic will almost always run MeshCore. The official flasher lists boards that play nicely.
A personal companion gets you on the air with the people around you. A solar repeater, mounted as high as you can honestly put it, is what ties your street into the wider mesh. Buy that assembled, or build one when you are ready. The Austin mesh community has published useful build notes, and so has YouTube. Borrow what helps and ask when a step is fuzzy.
2. Flash it
This step sounds technical and takes about ten quiet minutes. Open the MeshCore web flasher in Chrome or Edge, plug the board in, pick it from the list, and choose the companion Bluetooth role. The page walks you through the clicks. If the radio already has a MeshCore name you want to keep, skip the full erase. You are updating a friend, not wiping the slate.
3. Install the app
Install the MeshCore app on your phone. The link lives on meshcore.io. This is the screen you will actually type on. The radio just carries what you write.
4. Connect and say hello
This is the good part. You are about to be on the same network as your neighbors.
- Pair the radio in the app over Bluetooth.
- Tap Connect and choose your device. The PIN is often 123456, or a code shown on the screen if the radio has one.
- In settings, choose the USA/Canada recommended preset, save it, and reboot the radio.
Then send a message. Hello is a perfectly good first one. Quiet at first is normal, especially indoors or in a low part of town, so do not take the silence personally. A repeater on a roof changes that more than any setting in the app. The map linked from the app shows radios that have checked in around Bryan–College Station. It is a comforting way to see you are on the same channel as the rest of us.
The wider MeshCore community hangs out on the project Discord if you enjoy that kind of room. Questions about this local network can come straight here. We would rather hear from you than have you stuck on a step.