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  • 2 min read

May 21st repeater meetup

We will hold a Mesh Montreal repeater meet up at room C-9019 of Lionel Groulx wing of Université de Montréal on Thursday May 21st from 19h to 21h.

Important

Note that this is not at Polytechnique as previously indicated. It's close to Université de Montréal and Côte-des-Neiges métro! The exact address is 3150 Jean-Brillant (Google Maps link).

We invite everyone who currently operates1 a relay in the greater Montreal area, whether it is Meshcore, Meshtastic, or Reticulum, to join us to talk about how we organise.

Context

This is the first time we hold an actual meeting for the Montreal Mesh in some form in over a decade. Those familiar with history know that we used to have regular meetings and we believe the time has come to start meeting again.

We have had a few informal meetups at Mesh night (and there is Mesh Day coming up) but this event is different.

We have lots of people excited about the mesh, setting up Meshtastic, Meshcore, Reticulum devices all over the city, yet we barely know who to talk with when there's a problem.

We have communication channels all over the place: Matrix, Discord, Telegram, Mattermost. We have two, maybe three websites.

We don't quite know who we are, or how things work.

Let's organise this.

Agenda

Here is a tentative agenda. We realize that it is an ambitious goal and that we'll likely not review all of those points.

That's fine.

The main objective of the meeting is to break the ice and isolation; create a regular space where those kind of discussions can happen.

  1. Welcome: translation, agenda, facilitation, minutes, timing
  2. Round table: name, pronoun, call sign / nick, relay description
  3. Who are we? Réseau Libre? Montreal Mesh? Quebec, Canada Mesh? Operators? Anarchists?
  4. How do we organise? Informal, affinity groups, council, committees, non-profit? vote, consensus, elections?
  5. What do we do? Infrastructure? Hacking?
  6. Platform choices:
    • communications: Matrix, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, etc?
    • web: montrealmesh.ca, lora.reseaulibre.ca, meshcore.ca?
    • LoRa: Meshtastic, Meshcore, Reticulum?
  7. Next meeting

This first meeting is held in person, to solidify the physicality of the Mesh. But future meetings could be held alternatively in person and online, to facilitate participation from people further out from the city.

  1. For now, we consider a "relay operator" to be a person who is currently responsible for the operation of a device which repeats signal for other devices. This includes essentially every Meshtastic device out there, Meshcore repeaters, and Reticulum transport nodes. But intent matters: we're happy to welcome you if you haven't setup your Meshcore repeater or Reticulum transport node just yet but are almost there, but we're less interested if you're "just" experimenting with Meshtastic to connect devices in your backyard. But defining this is exactly why we need to have that meeting. So for now, we're bootstrapping on "operator". ↩

Deprecating Meshtastic in Montreal

As of today, Meshcore has overtaken Meshtastic in number of devices visible from maps in the greater Montreal area. While this might be a questionable heuristic, it's pretty clear when comparing the current Meshcore map and the Meshtastic map that Meshcore has already surpassed Meshtastic in raw numbers.

As of today, there are 54 Meshcore devices and at most 29 Meshtastic devices on those maps.

Last year, Meshcore barely existed at all.

Late 2025, I setup my first Meshcore companion, and I wasn't seeing any relays. In fact, I don't remember there being any relay in Montreal a couple of months ago.

In March 2026, a similar map survey showed about 25 Meshcore devices. A month later, there's double that number.

All that time, I tried to work with Meshtastic. I tried to ping people, talk, nothing went through. Telemetry showed me devices as far as Burlington, Vermont! And we'd sometimes hear messages from there. But I have never really seen a full conversation happen over Meshtastic.

Now, with about a dozen Meshcore relays visible from my roof, I already feel the mesh is more reliable. It's just a hunch, but I feel Meshcore's more deliberate, "infrastructure" approach will scale better than Meshtastic's more "ad-hoc" approach.

So this is my call: let's deprecate Meshtastic and focus on other technologies. Right now, Meshcore certainly seems to have the momentum.

But let's keep an eye on Reticulum too; good progress has been made on various firmware projects based on micro-Reticulum, which embed a full transport node onto the same micro-controller devices that run Meshtastic or Meshcore. It's not yet as easy to deploy yet, but certainly something to keep an eye on.

  • in events
  • 1 min read

Mesh night and day in May

Every month, Foulab, the Montreal hacker space, holds a mesh night the first Wednesday of the month, and this month is no exception!

So let's meet at Foulab on May 6h from 19:00 to 22:00. We will be talking about and experimenting with mesh networking technologies such as Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum.

Beginners are welcome to drop by, we are happy to answer your questions and demo our devices for you.

This month Foulab also hosts the Mesh day 2 event, where MATC is...

inviting all autonomous anarchist groups who are planning or actively working on building mesh networks across Montreal (and the world) to get together to discuss strategy, technique and how we can collaborate and coordinate our efforts.

This will be a guided discussion hosted by the Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence.

If you are new to mesh network technology, we invite you to check out the workshop and skill share table introducing and exploring Reticulum that will be happening during the Skill share day on Sunday at CEDA!

That is on Friday May 15, 12h - 15h, followed by a movie/pizza night.

Foulab's location is Suite 33B, 999 du Collège, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H4C 2S3 (Google maps link).