About

NWI Mesh Net is a volunteer-built Meshtastic network covering Lake, Porter, and LaPorte counties in Northwest Indiana, from the lakefront down into the rural south. It is a community project, not a company and not a service: there is nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay, and nobody on call.

What we actually are

A few dozen people with small LoRa radios on rooftops, silos, windowsills, dashboards, and in backpacks. Each node relays messages for the others, so the network works without cell towers, without internet, and without a central server. Add a node and the coverage grows for everyone; the mesh heals around nodes that go away.

Our nodes regularly reach into the Chicago area, Michigan, and central Indiana by radio, so you will see traffic from well outside Northwest Indiana. That is normal and it is the point.

Who runs it

Volunteers. Infrastructure is sponsored by the Porter County Amateur Radio Club (PCARC) and ODARC, and the club is where much of the coordination happens. No ham license is required to join the mesh, and plenty of our members do not have one.

The site and the network tooling (HopWatch, our mesh observatory) are maintained by community members in their spare time.

Get in touch

There is no support desk and no email queue. Ask in the community and someone will answer:

• Discord — the fastest place to get help, and where build-out gets coordinated
• Facebook group — announcements and a slower-paced conversation
• PCARC — club meetings are a good place to meet people running nodes in person

When asking for help, post your device model, firmware version, and what your app's Nodes list shows. That gets you a useful answer in one round instead of five.

How to help

Run a node. The single most useful thing. Even a $11 board in an upstairs window adds coverage. Start with the quick start and FAQ and the hardware page.

Get it high. Height beats hardware, every time. A node with a mediocre antenna on a roof outperforms an excellent antenna on a desk. See the Antenna & Placement Guide.

Host an infrastructure node. This is what the network needs most. If you have access to a rooftop, a silo, a tower, a water tank, a commercial building, or anything else with height and a power outlet, you can cover a large area by yourself. We can help with the parts list, the config, and sometimes the hardware. Bring it up in Discord with a rough location and someone will tell you what the coverage gap looks like from there.

Before you build one, read Power & Sleep Settings (sizing, enclosures, weatherproofing) and Node Roles Explained.

Keep the mesh healthy. Use the standard settings. Most mesh problems are not hardware problems; they are one node configured to shout.

Help someone else get on. Buying a two-pack and handing the second node to a neighbor is how coverage actually spreads.

Supporting the network

Nobody collects dues. If you buy gear through the affiliate links on our hardware page, a small commission comes back to the network at no extra cost to you, and it goes toward infrastructure nodes. That is the whole funding model.

What this network is not

Worth being blunt, because people sometimes arrive with the wrong expectation:

• Not a life-safety system. It is volunteer-run hobby radio with no uptime guarantee. Do not rely on it for emergencies. Call 911.
• Not private by default. Traffic on the public LongFast channel is readable by anyone with a radio and the default key, and anything uplinked to MQTT may appear on public maps. Use an encrypted channel for anything you would not post publicly.
• Not the internet. It carries short text messages and telemetry. No web, no voice, no photos.
• Not fast. Messages take seconds and sometimes do not arrive. That is the tradeoff for the range and the independence.

Nearby networks

• Chicagoland Mesh
• Michigan Mesh
• Central Indiana Mesh