Starting on May 9th and 10th, WPA Mesh’s MQTT system will be deactivated on the second weekend of each month.
Why?
MQTT helps to connect our nodes across Western PA’s challenging terrain (and beyond). We love how well it works, but it also makes it difficult to understand how well our mesh would work if MQTT stopped functioning. That’s why we’re going to start holding these monthly RF-only weekends as an opportunity to test and tweak so we can make a more resilient mesh. Pending some key tower infrastructure updates expected in the coming weeks, we will also start to use these weekends to test radio presets other than LongFast such as MediumFast and MediumSlow.
What do you need to do?
Well, you don’t need to do anything! You don’t need to change any settings, and your Meshtastic radios should work the way they were designed over radio frequency only. Your messages likely won’t travel as far and you won’t receive as many messages without the MQTT boost from the various gateways scattered across the region.
Here’s what you might want to do:
1) Plan to send some test messages and traceroutes during the test weekends to see how well your radios are connected. You could even reset your node database to see how it repopulates without MQTT. 2) Check that your firmware is updated on each of your nodes and that they have the best placement possible — ideally high and outside or near a window. 3) Consider setting up more than one node, especially when we test different presets. More details on that soon.
But what about Meshcore?
This is also a great chance to flash the Meshcore firmware on a spare/new node and join our growing Meshcore mesh that’s already RF-only…and working surprisingly well.