Short answers for people new to MeshCore around Boston. Numbers come from what our Woburn radio hears.
Busy hours on the mesh: 6 am to 11 pm (from real traffic). Routine posts would wait for these hours; serious weather warnings would not. Sending: on. Serious alerts from trusted sources may post on their own; everything else is checked by a person first. Every post stays in the Boston region.
Hearing and being heard are different. Your radio can hear a strong repeater on a hill, but a small antenna indoors may not reach back to it. Try sending from higher up or outdoors, check that your channel name is typed exactly (with the #), and see whether a repeater near you is listed under Near me.
"Failed" means no acknowledgement came back in time, not always that your message was lost. The acknowledgement has to travel back over every hop. Try Reset path on the contact so the next message searches again, make sure you are not on a default region the other side doesn't carry, and use a channel for anything far away.
Mostly not. Our radio sees the frequency in use about 3–4% of the time, a little more in the evening, and only about a quarter of packets are people chatting; the rest are requests, routing and adverts. See Mesh load for the live numbers, and turn on See other receivers for your own area.
A region tag such as bos keeps a post local: only repeaters that carry bos pass it on. It saves airtime for everyone but reaches fewer people; unscoped posts travel much further, sometimes into other states.
Public for hellos, #ma-mesh for Massachusetts mesh talk, #test or #testing to check your reach, and the #dispatch channels for local alerts.
Send a message on #test: bots reply with how many hops it took and which repeaters carried it. Or type your node's name under Is my node heard? on the homepage.
A repeater is a radio, usually up high and powered all the time, that passes messages along the mesh so they reach further than your own radio can. It does not write messages; it hears one and sends it on, so each repeater is a hop. Most are run by people in the community. The Repeaters page lists the ones our radio hears, and each repeater's page shows what it carried, who relies on it and where it is.
Higher is better, with a clear view toward busy repeaters. Under Near me the homepage suggests the highest ground within a mile of you and how many busy repeaters are around it.
How long each repeater's ID is in a message's route. Longer IDs give clearer routes because fewer repeaters share them; many local operators recommend 2-byte paths on companions and repeaters.