I did a post about a week back when I started investigating a possible migration from Meshtastic radio to MeshCore radio network. I won’t repeat that post here, but I’ll mention two issues that often came up about MeshCore, and why this is just no longer true.
Myth 1: MeshCore is not open source – since about January 2026 there is an excellent fully open source mobile app called MeshCore Open. It was so impressive for me, that I’ve actually made it my daily driver, even though I’d paid for the official MeshCore app and the MeshOS app.
Myth 2: Because it does not flood fill locations you can’t use MeshCore for search and rescue (SAR), hiking, EMCOMM, etc. Well the open source MeshCore SAR app blows that out of the water now.
MeshCore SAR has:
- Rapid mesh chat for both 1:1 and group coordination
- On-demand voice (Codec2) and image (AVIF) transfer tuned for low-bandwidth links
- Offline-first mapping with tactical overlays and SAR incident markers
- Live team location, movement trails, and shareable tactical drawings
- It goes as far as low-res image sending as well as short voice clips too
It is not intended for daily use though, as it could be easy to abuse the limited duty cycle requirements in the license-free bands that MeshCore uses.
I did some wardriving today using the Meshmapper app, and managed to get a line of site ping from a repeater 111 km North of Cape Town. So our testing of MashCore so far has just been green ticks all the way.