this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Meshtastic

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Hey folks I recently saw a node pop up that was just shy of 1000 miles away. I wanted to double check my understanding of how the location of nodes is determined.

Theoretically this person could have set the lat/long hard coded in the settings and could be shown anywhere. I am assuming that is what happened here as that sort of distance seems crazy to me. They did have 7 hops to get to me but even then I am dubious.

Thinking about this more I am guessing MQTT could be at play as well and I need to do some more reading there.

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In meshtastic, you can manually set the location with long/lat.

Ive seen it where people dont update that while they go on trips.

Also there is MQTT so if the node can communicate with the internet, its possible.

[โ€“] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Could be any or all of that, yeah. You can also set the level of precision for your reported location, but I don't think even the lowest precision settings would put it 1,000 miles away.

I live near-ish to an airport, and I'll occasionally see nodes that are 1 or 2 hops and 100-200+ miles away. Best I can tell, the airborne node is legit relaying those which I think is pretty cool. Not really useful, but cool.