Tri-Cities Mesh is moving to MeshCore

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tri-Cities Mesh is moving from Meshtastic to MeshCore.

Why

Meshtastic got this community started, and we’re grateful for it. As the local mesh grew, its design, where nearly every radio rebroadcasts what it hears, started to work against us in our hilly terrain.

MeshCore takes a different approach. Only dedicated repeaters relay traffic. Personal radios, called companions, don’t. Direct messages travel along a learned path instead of flooding the whole network. That keeps the airwaves quieter and lets the network grow without slowing down.

Installing a node on Bays Mountain

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bays Mountain is one of the best vantage points in the Tri-Cities, and the Kingsport Amateur Radio Club’s tower up there is an obvious home for a mesh node. Getting one working has been harder than expected.

The short version

July 2024. The first node went up but wasn’t working when installed.
January 2025. We brought it down and found the battery had died before install. The RAK board didn’t power itself back on when the battery recovered.
February 2025. After a reset and reinstall it sent telemetry fine, but it wouldn’t receive or relay messages.
Summer 2025. We tested other hardware. A node at another corner of the mountain worked fine, which pointed to RF noise at the tower site.
October 2025. We reinstalled with a new RAK node, a new enclosure, and a 900 MHz cavity filter. Next we’ll try mounting it a few feet off the tower.

The full history, with photos, is on the Bays Mountain node page.

News on Tri-Cities Mesh

Tri-Cities Mesh is moving to MeshCore

Why

Installing a node on Bays Mountain

The short version