DC Mesh is a community group working to build a mesh network of solar-powered Meshtastic and Meshcore radios in Washington DC. This network acts like a city-wide text messaging system, allowing people to communicate publicly or privately with anyone on the network. All of this happens without any external infrastructure – no power, no cell phone towers, no internet. We have in-person meetings every three months – come join us!
Come meet us for one of our next two quarterly in-person meetups:
Q3 2026: September 8th, 6PM-7:30PM
Q4 2026: December 3rd, 6PM-7:30PM
Cleveland Park Bar and Grill
3407 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008
Meet us at the bar upstairs
More details on our discord.
We’ve been testing out some cheap LibreMesh WiFi nodes. Today we did a range test on two directional nodes.
Both nodes used $39 GL.iNet GL-AR300M16-Ext WiFi routers flashed with LibreMesh. These routers were chosen because they are the cheapest, lowest-power WiFi nodes capable of running LibreMesh. We’ve successfully solar-powered them using a $30 12-watt solar panel and a $45 Voltaic V25 6,400mAh battery – they run indefinitely with this setup.
The first node used a $49 15dBi panel antenna.
The second node used two 12 dBi directional PCB antennas ($14 for both).
Test Results:
Farthest distance: 600 feet (-83 dBm)
Farthest reliable distance: 400 feet (-78 dBm)
Speed test at this distance: 0.6 Mbps (normal speed is 6-10 Mbps - internet is coming from a cell wifi hotspot)
Conditions: through a bunch of wet trees
Vertical and horizontal polarization didn't seem to affect dBm at max distanceHere’s what a 400 foot diameter hexagon overlay on DuPont Circle looks like:
Conclusion:
It’s prohibitively expensive to run a WiFi mesh network using LibreMesh.
Covering a neighborhood like DuPont Circle would require 100 nodes, with a cost of about $4,000 for nodes powered by wall plugs without directional antennas, and about $20,000 for solar-powered nodes with better antennas.
The only way a WiFi mesh network would pencil out is if we deployed “super nodes” on top of tall buildings like NYC Mesh does – but the cost would still be thousands of dollars.
We’re going to stick to expanding our Meshtastic and Meshcore meshes for now!
Great success with our 4th DC Mesh in-person meeting. We had seven members join us – thank you to everyone who made it out. Mike brought the Meshing Around BBS server which we all got to use in person with extremely low latency. We talked about syncing up the BBS servers, expanding the mesh towards Baltimore, and heard about varying experiences with the Slot 9 network in NoVa. One excellent idea that came out of the meeting was adding a bot to our discord that sends and receives messages from the network to a channel on the discord. We meet in person every quarter so we hope to see you all in a few months!
Join us for an in-person DC Mesh meeting
Thursday October 16
6PM
Roofers Union
2446 18th St NW, Washington, DC
We’ve got a new solar powered Meshtastic node running in Cleveland Park. Full build instructions here: https://dcmesh.org/building-a-solar-powered-repeater/
Here’s a roundup of a few meshtastic map services…
MeshMap
MeshMap uses data from the official Meshtastic MQTT server. Nodes are updated every minute and drop off the map if not seen for 24 hours.
Mpowered247 Map
The Mpowered map shows a heatmap when you zoom out.
Liam Cottle’s Map
https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net
Liam’s map runs off of data from a private MQTT server
Then cool thing about Liam’s map it it can show connection lines between nodes:
K1RA Meshtastic Map
K1RA has a good map for the area of Virginia just outside of Washington DC. They use their own MQTT server and utilize Liam Cottle’s map software to map their mesh.
Friendly Dev Map
https://meshtastic-map.friendlydev.com
The Friendly Dev Map aggregates from a few sources including the Mpowered map.
Paraguide Map
Shows a few nodes using MQTT.
Come join us at our first in-person meeting:
Thursday February 6th 2025, 6PM
Nanny O’Briens Irish Pub
3319 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008
We’ll try to sit by the front door. Look for the group playing around with metastatic radios. Bring your metastatic device if you’re got one. See you there!
DC Mesh is a community group working to build a mesh network of solar-powered Meshtastic radios in Washington DC. This network acts like a city-wide text messaging system, allowing people to communicate publicly or privately with anyone on the network. All of this happens without any external infrastructure – no power, no cell phone towers, no internet.
DC Mesh follows in the footsteps of Austin Mesh, a metastatic group in Austin Texas that has built up one of the largest Meshtastic networks on earth.
Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram.
Join our Discord.
And come to an in-person meetings in Washington DC! We host them quarterly. Details can be found on this website and on our Discord.
This site is (c) by Will Martin and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.