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title: Local Mesh Discovery

parent: User Guide

nav_order: 12

last_updated: 2026-09-11

description: Explore your mesh network — the Local Mesh Discovery scanner, traceroute paths, neighbor maps, and node discovery tools.

aliases:

• discovery

• local-mesh-discovery

• mesh-discovery

• local-discovery

• network-scan

• traceroute

• neighbor-info

Discovery tools help you understand how your mesh network is connected — which nodes can hear each other, what paths messages take, and where bottlenecks or weak links exist.

The app offers two complementary approaches:

• Local Mesh Discovery (Scanner) — an automated mode that cycles your connected radio through different LoRa presets, listens on each, and ranks which preset performs best at your location.

• Manual exploration — traceroute, Neighbor Info, and the node list, which you can use at any time to investigate specific paths and topology.

Local Mesh Discovery is a dedicated scanning mode that helps you find the best LoRa modem preset for your location and see which nodes are active on each preset. It cycles your connected radio through one or more presets you choose, dwells on each one — listens for a set time — to collect packets, then analyzes and ranks the results.

Connect your radio, then open Settings → Advanced → Local Mesh Discovery. On Android the Advanced section stays grayed out until a radio is connected and the app has finished reading its configuration, and every entry in it is disabled on a managed device. On desktop, Local Mesh Discovery has its own entry on the Settings screen, with no such gate.

│ ℹ️ Note: Discovery temporarily changes your radio's LoRa settings while it scans, then restores

│ your original configuration when it finishes.

Before starting, configure these controls:

The Start Scan button stays disabled — with an explanation of why — until the scan can run. Common reasons it's disabled:

• The radio is not connected.

• No presets have been selected to scan.

• The selected preset uses 2.4 GHz, which your hardware doesn't support.

While a scan runs, Discovery shows its current stage:

!Dwell countdown showing time remaining on the current preset

If a scan is interrupted — the app is closed, or the radio goes away — the app restores your original preset the next time it reconnects to that radio, and tells you it has done so. Reconnect the same radio to let that happen; until you do, the radio stays on whichever preset the scan left it on.

When the scan completes, Discovery presents a per-preset result card for each preset it tested, plus an overall summary.

!Per-preset result card with ranking and collected metrics

Metrics include:

Additional features available from the results:

• Scan History — saved sessions you can revisit; view or delete past scans.

• Discovery Map — a map of the nodes found during the scan.

• Report export — export a report as a PDF on Android, or as text on other platforms.

│ 💡 Tip: On Google Play builds, Discovery can generate an on-device AI summary (Gemini Nano) of

│ your results. F-Droid builds always use the algorithmic summary — the proprietary ML Kit

│ dependency is deliberately excluded from that flavor — so you get a readable interpretation of

│ the scan either way.

Mesh Beacon lets nodes invite others to join their mesh. A beaconing node periodically broadcasts an invitation — optionally advertising a channel, region, and modem preset — that nearby nodes can hear even before they share a configuration.

Configure it under Settings → Module configuration → Mesh Beacon. The entry appears only on radios running firmware 2.8.0 or newer. A read-only Region row at the top of the screen shows the region the beacon advertises: that region, and the preset, are always the ones the radio itself uses, so a beacon cannot invite anyone onto settings your radio is not running.

• Listen for beacons — receive invitations broadcast by other nodes.

• Broadcast a beacon — periodically advertise this mesh to nearby nodes, with an optional Beacon message of up to 100 bytes, a Broadcast interval picked from fixed intervals between 1 hour and 72 hours, and an Offered channel chosen from your radio's own channels. The offered channel is required, and defaults to your primary channel. Over remote admin the picker offers the primary channel only.

• Broadcast targets — optional extra destinations beyond the offered channel. Add target appends a row; each row picks a Channel and a Transmit preset, and Remove target deletes it. With no targets, the beacon goes out on the offered channel alone.

Two conditions block beacon setup:

• The radio has no region set. The screen shows nothing but Set your radio's region before setting up a beacon. Set the region on Settings → LoRa first.

• The radio uses custom LoRa settings. A beacon advertises a modem preset for others to join, so a radio with Use Preset turned off has no standard preset to offer. In that state Broadcast a beacon can be turned off but not on, and the broadcast settings are read-only. Listening for beacons is unaffected.

Received invitations appear as Mesh invitations cards on the Discovery screen. Each card shows the sender's message plus the offered channel, region, preset, and signal quality, with these actions:

• Join — switch to the offered channel and preset (retunes the radio and reboots). When the offer matches your current frequency slot, an Add channel action adds it without a reboot.

• Discover — seed a Discovery scan with the offered preset so you can survey that mesh before joining (shown only when the beacon offers a preset).

• Dismiss — ignore the invitation.

Channels advertised by beacons also show up in the scan setup as Beacon channels — select one to include it as a scan target.

An invitation to a mesh your radio is already on is suppressed: no card, no notification, and no Beacon channels entry. A channel counts as one you already have only when both its name and its key match a channel on your radio — the same name with a different key is a different mesh, so that invitation still reaches you.

The following tools are available at any time from the node list and node detail screens. Use them to investigate specific paths and build a topology picture, alongside or instead of a full scan.

Traceroute reveals the exact path a message takes from your node to any other node on the mesh. It's the single most useful tool for debugging connectivity problems.

1. Navigate to Nodes and tap the node you want to trace.

2. On the node detail screen, find Traceroute in the Telemetry section and tap its request button. Once a result arrives, a second button on the same row opens the traceroute log, where each hop is listed with its signal quality.

A traceroute result looks like this:

T282828

Each T383838⇊ line between two nodes is one relay hop, and the SNR on that line is the quality of that segment alone. The app colors it green at or above −7 dB, yellow at or above −15 dB, and orange below that. A request that also gets a reply adds a second block under Route traced back to us:.

│ 💡 Tip: Run traceroute several times over a few minutes. If the path changes, your mesh has

│ redundant routes — a sign of a well-connected network.

• No Response — The traceroute got nothing back. The target node may be offline, out of range, or on a different channel. Check that both nodes share at least one channel with the same encryption key.

• Traceroute times out — The path may be too long (exceeds hop limit) or a relay node is congested. Try increasing the hop limit in Settings → LoRa.

• Cannot show traceroute map because the start or destination node has no position information — The path was traced, but one end has never shared a position.

• Asymmetric paths — A traceroute from A→B may take a different path than B→A. This is normal — radio propagation is not always symmetric.

The Neighbor Info module lets each node broadcast a list of the nodes it can directly hear (single-hop). When multiple nodes share their neighbor lists, you can piece together a topology map of the entire mesh.

1. Navigate to Settings → Module configuration → Neighbor Info.

2. Enable the module.

3. Set Update interval (seconds). The default is 21600 seconds (6 hours), and the firmware minimum is 14400 seconds (4 hours) — a smaller value is rejected and reset to the default.

4. Turn on Transmit over LoRa. Without it, your neighbor list goes only to MQTT and to this app, never over the air. It is unavailable on a channel that still uses the default name and key, so set up your own channel first — see Messages & Channels.

Once enabled and transmitting over LoRa, your node periodically broadcasts its neighbor list. Other nodes with Neighbor Info enabled do the same.

• Open a node's detail screen and find Neighbor Info in the Telemetry section. The request button asks the node for its current neighbor list; once the app has received one, a second button on the same row opens the log of everything that node has reported. The row appears only on nodes that can answer a neighbor request, or that have already reported neighbors.

• Each neighbor entry shows the node that was directly heard and its signal quality.

• Combine neighbor data from multiple nodes to understand the full mesh topology.

│ ℹ️ Note: Neighbor Info increases airtime usage because every enabled node periodically broadcasts

│ its neighbor list. The firmware does not accept an interval shorter than 14400 seconds (4 hours)

│ for this reason; on busy meshes, leave it at the 21600-second default or raise it further.

The node list itself is a powerful discovery tool when you use its filtering and sorting features effectively.

• Sort by Last heard to see the most recently active nodes at the top.

• Enable Include unknown to see nodes that have appeared on the mesh but haven't sent user info yet — these are often newly powered-on radios.

• Sort by Hops away to see which nodes are directly reachable (0 hops) versus relayed.

• Sort by Distance to find nearby nodes and verify they're reachable.

• Use Exclude MQTT to focus on nodes reachable over radio (not via internet bridge).

• Disable Exclude infrastructure to see Router, Router Late, and Client Base nodes.

• Check their signal quality and last-heard times to verify your infrastructure nodes are healthy.

See Nodes for full details on filtering and sorting options.

• Start with traceroute — it gives you immediate, actionable information about a specific path.

• Enable Neighbor Info on key nodes — especially routers and repeaters, to build a picture of the backbone.

• Check the map — node positions on the Map combined with signal data help you understand why some links are strong and others are weak.

• Compare signal over time — use the Signal Meter guide to interpret SNR and RSSI values correctly.

• Nodes — the node list these scans populate

• Map & Waypoints — see discovered nodes geographically

• Signal Meter — interpret the SNR and RSSI a scan reports

• Settings — Modules & Admin — configure the Mesh Beacon and Neighbor Info modules

• Messages & Channels — join a mesh you found and start talking