Roadmap

One of the most important remaining gaps. Potlatch has community members who would benefit from mesh coverage but currently has no nodes nearby.

• Potlatch — no nodes in range; needs at least one well-placed repeater

If you're in the area or know someone who is, reach out — a single good rooftop placement can open up a whole town.

A repeater is now deployed inside Colfax — the county seat has coverage and intranet connectivity within town. The node is not yet connected to the outside mesh, so it operates as a standalone island for now.

Next step is establishing a backhaul link to the broader PUW network — either via a well-placed relay node on the ridge between Colfax and Pullman, or a direct path to an existing repeater with line of sight.

Clarkston (Asotin County) and Pomeroy (Garfield County) are within our service area but currently have no repeater coverage. These communities sit south of Pullman with no mesh connectivity today.

If you have access to a site with line of sight toward either community, we are willing to donate the equipment toward the project — reach out and let's make it happen.

All repeaters and routers on the network should be migrated to 2-byte addressing. This is a firmware-level setting that improves routing efficiency and is the current standard for the MeshCore network.

If you run a node and haven't updated yet, this is the thing to do.

Coordinate with the Shrubsteppe Mesh community on a shared #se-wa channel for Southeast Washington infrastructure updates — node status, coverage changes, repeater outages, and cross-community coordination. A shared scope at the e-wa or se-wa level would let both communities stay informed without flooding unrelated regions.

PalBot 🤖 currently sends output as unscoped floods — every alert, road condition, and weather update propagates across the entire mesh regardless of relevance. The fix is straightforward: scope bot output to the region it actually serves.

• Scope #bot-palouse output to the puw region — bot traffic stays in Pullman/Moscow
• Scope alert output (weather, roads, wildfire) to the PUW service area
• Prevents bot noise from reaching nodes and users in unrelated regions as the mesh grows

#wx-palouse and #test-palouse are live. Bot output is currently scoped to ie — the plan is to tighten this to puw or palouse as the network matures and neighboring regions establish their own bots.

• NWS, WSDOT, ITD, wildfire, and AQI alerts active in #wx-palouse
• #test-palouse active for network diagnostics and routing checks
• Scope tightening from ie → palouse pending broader regional coordination

Both WSU and UI campuses are underserved. Dense student populations and existing antenna infrastructure make them good candidates for mesh expansion.

• Washington State University (Pullman)
• University of Idaho (Moscow)

Ham radio clubs, amateur radio groups, and CS/EE departments at both campuses are natural fits. Getting mesh hardware into student hands would grow the network fast and introduce a lot of people to LoRa radio.

More people knowing the mesh exists means more nodes, better coverage, and a more useful network for everyone. Ideas in progress:

• Local maker spaces and ham clubs
• Emergency preparedness groups and ARES/RACES
• Farmers and rural residents who already use radio

As the network grows, finer-grained regional scoping will help segment traffic and make the mesh more useful across a wider area. This is a longer-term architectural goal once coverage is more established.

As campus coverage grows, dedicated scopes for WSU and University of Idaho would let campus-wide traffic stay on campus without flooding the broader PUW region. Theoretical for now — needs operators on both campuses and coordination on tag naming before it's worth activating.