A community radio network for the Palouse — no cell service, no fees, built by locals.
Palouse Mesh runs on MeshCore — open-source firmware for small LoRa radios that pass messages between nodes like a radio relay chain. No cell towers, no internet connection, no monthly bill, no license required.
Nodes are battery or solar powered and can cover substantial distances line-of-sight from a hilltop. To get involved, reach out via the Facebook group, the Signal chat, or on the mesh itself.
Palouse Mesh covers the Palouse and Clearwater country on both sides of the state line — Whitman County in southeastern Washington, and Latah, Nez Perce and Clearwater counties in north-central Idaho.
Repeaters and observer nodes are on the air in Pullman (including one on the WSU campus), on Kamiak Butte, in Palouse and St John, on Moscow Mountain, and in Kendrick and Lewiston on the Idaho side. The Colfax link is up but marginal.
Hilltop sites carry well past the town they sit in, so nearby communities — Albion, Colton, Uniontown, Genesee, Troy, Oakesdale, Garfield, Tekoa, Rosalia — are within plausible line-of-sight range. Nothing is confirmed until a node there actually hears the mesh, so if you are in one of those towns, a companion radio settles it.
Known gaps: Potlatch needs an in-town node, Pomeroy and the rest of Garfield County have no connectivity, and the Washington side of the LC Valley — Clarkston and Asotin County — is thin.
The live map shows what is actually on the air right now. The roadmap has the current priority list and where we need help.
Palouse Mesh runs MeshCore, not Meshtastic. The two use similar LoRa hardware but different firmware and different protocols — they cannot talk to each other. We do not carry Meshtastic traffic and cannot support it.
If you came looking for local mesh networking, though, this is the local network. Most boards that run Meshtastic will also run MeshCore — check meshcore.io/flasher for yours, then follow the companion setup. The FAQ covers the differences in more detail.
Enter these in MeshCore under Radio Settings. All three must match exactly across the network.
Join both channels in MeshCore under Channels → + → Join a Hashtag Channel.
Enter via Console or from a companion node. Use the command for your repeater's location. Full details →
region def west pnw wa se-wa puw|pnw palouse region save
region def west pnw id n-id lws|pnw palouse region save
region def west pnw or c-or pdt|pnw palouse region save