What is txmesh?
A free, hosted bot service for the MeshCore radio networks across Texas.
Custom !commands, scheduled announcements and weather alerts, answered over the air by volunteer gateways, plus the live picture that makes it useful: who is on the air, how far their messages travel, and which paths they take to get there. Run by the volunteers behind Liberty Hill Mesh, and open to read without an account.
MeshCore is a long-range radio mesh. Small LoRa radios relay each other's messages, so a message can cross a city with no internet, no cell service and no infrastructure in between. Volunteers run observers: repeaters with the txmesh plugin, which hear the !commands and transmit the replies for their bots. Reporting what they hear along the way is where everything on this site comes from.
Three ways in
Most people start at the first door and never need the others. The second is what makes the site grow.
Look
The map, the node roster, the topology graph, the chat archive, the packet inspector, the weather and flood alert pages and every shared /p/ route trace are public. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to install.
Run an observer
Already run an openHop repeater? Add the txmesh plugin and it becomes the radio your bots answer through: !commands, scheduled announcements and weather alerts go out over it, and your part of the mesh joins the live map on the way. You get a login that renders the whole config for you. Tick I'm going to run an observer when you sign up and the setup page is ready when you land.
Build bots
With a gateway on the air, the Commands tab is yours: trigger !commands built in a wizard from helpers like {seen}, {vitals} and {route}, scheduled announcements, and automated NWS weather and river-gauge flood alerts. Your bots fire only on traffic your radios hear and reply only through your gateways.
Meshes on txmesh
Which networks feed into this dashboard today: the Texas meshes we cover, the neighbouring ones that share their sightings with us, and where we're looking for volunteers to bring more online.
Running or starting a mesh elsewhere in Texas, or want to feed your metro's network into txmesh? We'd love the help getting it on the map. Reach out at [email protected].
Houston & Dallas, help us light up the map
We can already see MeshCore repeaters around Houston (Harris, Fort Bend) and the Dallas Metroplex (Dallas, Tarrant) on the map, but those sightings are shared with us by MeshTexas observers, not heard by a gateway of ours. Neither metro has a local observer feeding txmesh directly yet, which is what a mesh needs before it gets its own bots and alerts. If you're in either metro and run a repeater, hosting an observer is a plugin install: it gives your mesh its own bots and weather alerts, and puts your city's nodes, topology and traffic on the live map for everyone.
Where the data comes from, and what we hold back
Heard, not scraped
Most of what you see is heard directly by volunteer observer radios. Some is shared with us by neighbouring mesh communities, and those sightings are labelled as such. Everything is archived so a route can be traced after the fact.
Locations are anonymized for visitors
Every position shown to signed-out visitors, repeaters included, is snapped to a grid about 1.5 km across, so a marker sits up to roughly a kilometre from the real thing and the map draws the circle it could actually be in. Enough to see the shape of a mesh; not enough to find a door.
Never shown publicly
Position history, private channels and direct messages. Signing in as an operator unlocks precise coordinates and history for what your own gateways collected, and nothing that isn't yours.
Data partner
MeshTexas.org ↗ shares a Texas-wide packet feed with us. Regional sightings from their observers flow into the analytics here, marked as external.
We're based in Liberty Hill, Texas, and part of the greater Central Texas mesh community, including Austin Mesh and San Antonio Mesh. txmesh is community-run and not an official service of any of them.
New to mesh?
Never touched a LoRa radio? Our step-by-step guide takes you from nothing to talking on the mesh, no internet or subscription required.