this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
27 points (96.6% liked)
Meshtastic
1821 readers
22 users here now
A community to discuss Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction)
Other mesh communities:
MeshCore: !Meshcore@feddit.org Reticulum: !Reticulum@mander.xyz
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really don't understand the esp32 Lora radios, they use so much power they're useless for anything battery powered. I only use one as my home gateway since it has WiFi and I keep it plugged in. It hops through my low power tree node as a proxy.
Low cost and WiFi is my guess.
Agree, anything that has an ESP32 for portable use is an immediate pass for me. I don't even consider it.
I've got a Haltec V4 running on battery/solar as a rooftop node. It's got a 10ah battery, but it's solar panel came loose and is currently very poorly aligned. On a cloudy set of days, it drops to about 80%. That said, I had to disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to do it. So really, not using ESP32 features, just it's 1W transmitter. My dedicated MQTT node is also ESP32, with Wi-Fi enabled, but it's constantly plugged in.