Type "hello from Broken Arrow" on your regional channel and press send. Now let's read what happens.
The tick marks
Next to your message you'll see a status. A single mark means your node transmitted it. When a neighbour acknowledges it - actually received and rebroadcast it - you get the delivered mark. No ack after a minute means nobody in range heard it, or they heard it and the ack didn't make it back. Both happen. Try again in a different spot before assuming the worst.
The node list
Open Nodes. Every node your radio has heard, directly or via others, is here with:
- Last heard - minutes or hours ago. Anything under an hour is live.
- SNR / RSSI - signal quality on the last packet. SNR above 0 dB is comfortable; LoRa still decodes down to about −20 dB, which is why it works at all.
- Hops - 0 means you heard them directly; 1, 2, 3 means somebody relayed. The default hop limit is 3.
- Role - CLIENT is normal. ROUTER nodes are the high ones that relay for everyone.
- Battery, position, hardware.
Direct messages
Tap a node → message. DMs are encrypted to that node's public key and travel over the mesh like anything else, so they're only as reliable as the path.
Traceroute
Tap a node → Traceroute. It shows you the path your packet took - which relays carried it - and is the single most useful diagnostic in the app. Screenshots of traceroutes are how mesh people talk about coverage.
Read the room
A regional channel is a shared space with maybe a hundred quiet listeners. A hello is welcome; a wall of test messages every minute is not. Once you know it works, say something useful - where you are, what you're hearing - and move on.
Now post your traceroute in the state Meshtastic group. People will tell you what they see from their end, and that's how you find out where the gaps are.