When a storm, an outage or a disaster takes the network down, the radios people already own mostly cannot help. A Meshtastic LoRa mesh keeps a village talking to itself, but it has no route out of the valley. A satellite modem can reach the far side of the planet, but it costs real money per message and almost nobody carries one. A phone is useless without a tower.
MeshSat is the piece in between: open source gateways that take a message off a local mesh and find a way out over whatever bearer is still alive. Eight transport bearers, reachable across nine wired Reticulum interfaces, with cost-aware routing so traffic stays on the free bearers and only reaches for the metered ones when nothing free is left.
Pre-release. These are working prototypes under active development, not finished products. Nothing here has been deployed to a real user or used in an actual emergency. Each repository states plainly what has run on hardware and what has not.
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| MeshSat Bridge | The gateway. Go, runs as a Docker container on a Raspberry Pi. Meshtastic LoRa, Iridium satellite, cellular SMS, APRS/AX.25, ZigBee, BLE, TAK and MQTT, routed over Reticulum. |
| MeshSat Android | Standalone mobile gateway. Kotlin and Compose, with BLE mesh, SPP Iridium and native SMS. |
| MeshSat Hub | Multi-tenant fleet management for a fleet of bridges. Sign-up at hub.meshsat.net is open, and each account is approved by hand before it activates. |
| meshsat-website | meshsat.net, the documentation site, and the install script. |
| MeshSat Field Kit | The hardware. The two kits built so far (tesseract and parallax: Pi 5, UPS, five radios and a satellite modem in an IP67 case) with their build guide, and the V2 carrier PCB set for a Peli 1520 case: KiCad sources, the scripts that generate the boards, the case CAD, the Rev A release files. Rev A is designed and prepared for fabrication, not built yet. |
| MeshSat node | A pocket-sized node: a Meshtastic LoRa radio and a RockBLOCK 9603 Iridium modem in one small case, paired with MeshSat Android over a single Bluetooth link. Hardware versions, wiring, the Iridium Bluetooth service contract and bench tools. v1, on a LILYGO T-Beam Supreme, has run since 21 September 2026 and, since 27 September, carries a mesh channel over Iridium on its own when no phone is connected. |
| meshsat-firmware | The node's firmware: a fork of the Meshtastic firmware that adds an Iridium serial service next to the Meshtastic one. Based on Meshtastic® firmware; not affiliated with or endorsed by Meshtastic LLC. |
| meshsat-lora-backplate | The Pine64 LoRa back cover on a PinePhone Pro as a Meshtastic node under Linux: the bridge layer for the cover's ATtiny, the bench measurements, the node packaging. Texts both ways with a T-Deck at 0 dBm on one bench; not above that (a plain crystal). |
| meshsat-linux | MeshSat for Linux phones: one package that makes that PinePhone a node and runs the Bridge beside it, with a phone-sized app. Installed on one phone; never by anyone else yet. |
| meshsat-sx1262-driver-android | MeshSat Android as a Meshtastic node on a PinePhone Pro: a Kotlin driver for the back cover's radio and Meshtastic's mesh layer in Kotlin. Just started; nothing has run on hardware yet. |
MeshSat began inside the CubeOS project and has outgrown it. The
repositories moved here in August 2026; old cubeos-app links redirect.
meshsat/meshsat is the place to start.
docker compose up -d # see the Bridge README for the compose fileThen open http://<your-ip>:6050.
- Matrix:
#meshsat:matrix.nuclearlighters.net - Website: meshsat.net and docs.meshsat.net
- Elsewhere: X and LinkedIn
- Email: info@meshsat.org
Bug reports from people running unusual hardware are the most useful thing you can send us. The supported-device tables are short because they only list what we have physically run.
Supported by SIDN fonds. A six month field programme starts in November 2026.
MeshSat does not work with any organisation that develops, produces, integrates or operates weapon systems, and provides nothing for use in one. The licences below are unchanged: the policy covers whom we work with, not what you may do with the code. Read the MeshSat Mission and Use Policy.
The software is free software under the GPLv3, except the Hub, which is Apache 2.0; the hardware repository is released under the CERN-OHL-S-2.0. Built in Leiden, the Netherlands, by Elli and Kyriakos.