A radio on a Woburn rooftop listens to the local mesh. A small home computer decodes and saves what it hears, and this website shows it. Meet the radio itself on its own page: the region it serves, its sources and what it has posted.
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.
flowchart LR A["Local mesh radios
(MeshCore, LoRa)"] --> B["Our rooftop radio
listens"] B --> C["Home computer
decodes and saves messages"] S["Public sources
weather alerts · highway traffic"] --> C C --> D[("Message archive")] D --> E["This website"] C --> T["A second radio sends
rare, checked posts"] T -. "Boston region only" .-> A
One radio only listens. A separate radio sends our rare posts, and only inside the Boston region. The status above says whether anything posts on its own.
Messages on public channels, so you can look up one you missed. Private messages and private channels are never read.
Rare, short posts on our own channels, clearly labelled as a bot, and limited to the Boston region so they stay off the rest of the mesh.
The National Weather Service and MassDOT's Mass511, which includes some crowd-sourced Waze reports. Public sources only.
Dispatch watches when people actually use the mesh and posts only then. Overnight it stays quiet, except for serious weather warnings. The busy hours it uses are shown above. A person checks each post first, unless it is a serious alert from a source we trust to post on its own.
Where Dispatch's information comes from. Busy data marks the sources behind the How busy is the mesh numbers.
| Source | What we take | How often | Busy data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our Woburn radio (MeshCore receiver) | Every packet and public channel message it hears | Live | Yes |
| New England MeshCore analyzer | Receivers' positions and packets per hour, repeaters' relay counts, messages per channel per hour by region | Hourly | Yes (with See other receivers on) |
| Boston Mesh health check | Receiver statistics | Hourly | Yes (with See other receivers on) |
| OpenStreetMap (Nominatim, map tiles) and Open-Meteo elevation | Town lookup, maps, ground height for the best repeater spot | On request, cached | No |
| National Weather Service | Watches, warnings and forecasts | Every 5 minutes | No |
| MassDOT Mass511, MBTA, MEMA outages, NOAA tide gauge, FAA, AirNow, Boston 311 | Traffic, transit, outage, tide, airport, air quality and city reports | Every 5–15 minutes | No |
Other networks' numbers lag ours because we read them once an hour. Thank you to the volunteers who run the analyzer and the health check.
The code will be published so anyone can run Dispatch for their own town on a Raspberry Pi or any small computer.