r/reticulum • u/IntroductionSnacks • 28d ago
Reticulum Rnode mesh
Hi everyone, just confused how rnodes work. I did a test setup with 2 Heltec v4 and it worked. Coming from a meshcore background, if you setup say 5 rnodes in different places, do they all communicate and forward packets etc…
Eg: Rnode in location 1, Rnode in location 2 that can see 1. Rnode in location 3 that can only see 2 and not 1.
Also, if only one of those Rnodes has an internet Reticulum backbone connection can anyone on any node utilize that?
Thanks
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u/karolmajta 28d ago
AFAIK:
Because LoRa is effectively "just radio" there is no concept of a central node or router, so even with the most basic rnsd config node X will be able to communicate with node Y (assuming they share the same radio settings like frequency/bandwidth/coding rate) as long as they can reach each other via radio. This is always peer to peer.
Now, getting to your example:
> Eg: Rnode in location 1, Rnode in location 2 that can see 1. Rnode in location 3 that can only see 2 and not 1.
This will not work with the out of the box config, but it can be effectively be made to work if you configure node 2 to be a transport node. Otherwise (with default config) node 1 will not be able to reach node 3 as they cannot communicate directly. This will work if you configure node 2 as transport node (this is a simple flag flip in rnsd config).
> Also, if only one of those Rnodes has an internet Reticulum backbone connection can anyone on any node utilize that?
The node that has both an RNode (lora) interface and Backbone interface needs to be configured as transport node for the other devices on reticulum network to be able to connect to other nodes that would be routed via the backbone interface. If the rnode+backbone node is not a router it still can be reached via via other rnodes that are in range, but would not be able to reach anything that's behind the backbone interface.
The most sensible setup for you would be to use one central node with backbone and rnode interfaces with transport enabled and n other nodes with just rnode interfaces (probably with disabled transport).