About

A coverage map you can check

MapMinter is a coverage map for MeshCore LoRa mesh networks. Every lit cell on it is a place where somebody's radio actually heard the mesh, not a place where a propagation model thinks it might.

Why it exists

A MeshCore network grows one node at a time, and nobody can say where it reaches. Operators raise a repeater and find out afterwards, by walking around with a handheld and asking people whether messages got through. The answer is already in the air: every packet a radio receives comes with a measurement of how well it was received. It was simply never written down anywhere shared.

MapMinter writes it down. People drive or walk with a MeshCore device and a phone, the app records what the radio hears and where it heard it, and the result is one map that anyone can look at before they buy an antenna.

Open and self-hostable

The map at mapminter.com is one instance, not the only one. MapMinter is built to be run by anyone: your own server, your own database, your own region, your own rules about who may upload. Nothing in the software depends on a hosted service, and no secret is baked into the code.

The source is not public yet. Until it is, self-hosting is a design commitment rather than something you can act on today. We would rather say that plainly than imply a repository exists for you to clone.

How a measurement is made

• A MeshCore device connected to the phone over Bluetooth LE pushes each received packet to the app as it arrives, in the 0x88 push frame of the MeshCore companion protocol.
• Each packet arrives with the receiver's own measurement of it: RSSI in dBm and SNR in dB. Both describe the last hop only: the link between whichever radio transmitted that copy of the packet and yours. They say nothing about hops further back in the path.
• The app adds the phone's position at the moment of reception and the radio settings in use (frequency, bandwidth, spreading factor, coding rate), because a measurement is only comparable to another measurement taken on the same settings.
• The server places each measurement in an H3 hexagonal cell and keeps, per cell and per transmitter: the strongest signal heard, the mean, the best SNR, how many samples went in, and when it was last heard.
• The colour of a cell on the map is the strongest signal heard there. The full walkthrough explains what that does and does not tell you.

Message contents are never part of this. A measurement is signal metadata and a position; what the packet said is not recorded. The privacy page lists every field.

What MapMinter is not

• Not a prediction. There is no terrain model behind the map. An area with no colour is an area nobody has driven, not an area with no signal.
• Not a people tracker. The map publishes aggregated cells and the positions nodes broadcast about themselves in their own adverts.
• Not Meshtastic. MapMinter maps MeshCore networks. The two are different protocols and a MapMinter collector will not read a Meshtastic mesh.

Who it is for

• Operators deciding where a repeater would actually help.
• Clubs and communities that want a shared picture of their own network.
• Emergency and event communications planners who need to know the real footprint.
• Anyone who wants to know how far their radio reaches, measured rather than guessed.