Meshcore: overcoming the issues

Yes, I'm still alive!

I recently started experimenting with Meshtastic - this lasted less than a day - and straight thereafter onto the much better Meshcore 868MHz network.

Though I live in what is to many a 'remote' area, with not that many active radio people about, I was surprised to find two repeaters on Anglesey and a couple of client nodes over on the mainland. 

Having kicked-off using just the standard stub antenna, I decided to spend the £68 for a Paradar 8.5dBi antenna (1m-long collinear). This is nicely made, though I'm not entirely persuaded by the sealant on the end caps, which remains unset on receipt. A quick spin with the self-amalgamating tape is therefore advisable. The mild steel bracket supplied is also poor; it will rust to bits in no time, especially in a salty sea air environment like mine. You can currently save yourself about £10 on Paradar's direct-to-consumer site if you buy via E-bay; you get the self-same antenna and DHL delivery (from Germany).

The Heltec V3 was easy to flash and configure as a client, and the Meshcore app connected to it, straight away. It's important to remember that flashing requires you to use Microsoft Edge browser.

I didn't have quite the same easy experience with the V4, which I ordered via E-bay from China (which, as always, arrived in just a few days - quicker than most UK sellers can manage!)

The problem I had was largely one of ignorance. Firstly, the V4 I have needs its 'User' button (the top one) pressed on powering-up in order to put it into flashing mode. Once I understood that, flashing via the Meshcore online site was simple enough. 

Where I had a day of scratching my head was: why couldn't I connect to the flashed V4 immediately after this process, which used the exact-same serial (USB-C) connection, in order to configure it?

Turns out that it's a matter of rather clunky sequencing: you put the unit into flashing mode with the 'User' button, do the flashing, disconnect the V4, then reconnect it in the normal sense, such that it powers-up, goes through its 'Please wait' thing and then displays the repeater settings for a while. When the screen went blank, I clicked on 'Configure via USB' on the flasher site (I left the flashing page open and didn't touch it until the Heltec's screen was clear). I then got the configuration screen and I was able to sort everything out.

I used the following settings (you can find out what everyone in your particular area is using from the Meshcore nodes map). You can also just choose 'UK/Narrow' from the app and it will auto-fill the settings for you:

Frequency: 869.618MHz
Bandwidth: 62.5kHz
Coding rate: 8
Spreading factor: 8

This immediately worked and was immediately seen by my client in the other room. I've yet to figure out GPS integration on the V4 board, but that's just a matter of developing enough patience some other day!

Incidentally, using the Paradar antenna at the window, on 30/01/2026, I received a repeater in Greystones, south of Dublin, at 115km! No tropo, no line-of-sight. This was either an aircraft reflection or someone who had come across to Wales on the ferry, setting off a ping or two on Anglesey, having not changed their repeater settings. I will have to try and communicate with the owner to find out!

I later discovered why my repeater wasn't sending periodic flood notifications; I hadn't logged-in to it via the phone app, using the password I'd set. This is very confusing, because if you log in with no password, it lets you do so, but has very few options (because you'd be a guest logger-inner in this case).

When I did log in with the password, I saw I was now logged-in as an admin and all the settings were now available. I still have no idea how to enable the GPS so that's still a wrestle for another day!

NOTE: If you switch off your Meshcore repeater and it has no battery attached, your settings will remain in place on powering-up again, but the repeater's clock won't. So you will need to re-sync the clock from the phone app.