Seeing Your First MeshCore Packet

The first time you connect an observer and open Live Packets, the stream starts populating. Names appear. Numbers. Timestamps ticking in real time. It looks like a lot — but each row contains exactly five pieces of information, and once you know what they are, the stream stops being a wall of text and starts being a live window into your network.

What the stream shows

Live Packets displays every packet your enrolled observers have received, in order of arrival. Each row is one packet, one radio event, one moment in your mesh.

The five fields:

Packet type. What kind of packet this is. The most common types you will see:

• ADVERT — a node announcing its identity to the mesh. This is how nodes make themselves known.
• MSG — a direct message between two contacts.
• GRP_TXT — a group channel (public or private) message.
• PATH — a path-discovery response, part of MeshCore’s routing handshake.
• ACK — an acknowledgment confirming message delivery.

ADVERT packets tend to dominate a newly connected observer’s stream, because repeaters broadcast them periodically and companion radios send them when they first join. An ADVERT from a node you have never seen before means a new contact is within radio range.

Node name. The human-readable name the node’s operator assigned it. This is whatever was set in the firmware configuration — often something like w6abc-hilltop or relay-north. If the node carries a privacy marker (⛔ 🛑 🚫), it is identity-scrubbed at the ingest edge and does not appear in Live Packets.

SNR. Signal-to-Noise Ratio, in decibels, as received by your observer’s radio. This is the quality of the radio signal at the moment your observer heard this particular packet. +9 dB is a comfortable working link. +2 dB is marginal. Below 0 dB, the radio is working harder to decode the signal — LoRa’s spread-spectrum modulation can handle it, but do not plan around it for infrastructure you depend on. A deeper explanation of what the numbers mean is in Reading the Signal.

Hop count. How many radio legs the packet traveled from its source node to your observer. A hop count of 1 means your observer heard the source directly. A count of 2 means it passed through one relay. For a first-look diagnostic: a node showing 1h is within direct radio range of your observer; 4h is routing a long way through the network, which may be normal for a remote node or may signal a path problem worth looking at.

Timestamp. When the packet arrived at your observer, to the second. Packets appear in Live Packets within seconds of the radio event — this is what “real time” means in practice.

The first packet usually says “I’m here”

When your observer first comes online and Waev connects to your broker, the first packets to appear are almost always ADVERTs from nearby repeaters or companion radios. This is expected: repeaters broadcast adverts on a schedule (the interval varies by firmware version and node configuration, and nodes also send one sooner after they power on), and the first advert you see from a given node is that node introducing itself to your observer.

If you see an ADVERT from a node you recognize — a repeater you deployed, a club member’s radio — it is confirmation the mesh is reaching your observer and the pipeline from radio to Live Packets is working end-to-end. That is the milestone. Everything else is the network doing what it always does; now you can watch it.

What a quiet stream tells you

If Live Packets is empty, or nothing has arrived in several minutes, there are a few likely causes. The most common: your observer is not yet enrolled in Waev, or the MQTT connection between your observer and your broker has not established. Check the observer’s MQTT status and confirm it is publishing to the correct broker. If the connection is healthy and the network is genuinely quiet, that is also useful data — it means no nodes are currently within radio range of your observer, or all nearby nodes are privacy-marked. Both tell you something real about your coverage.

Where to look next

Once the first packets start arriving, two surfaces in Waev help you go deeper. Network Stats aggregates the path-quality picture across all active nodes — hop counts, SNR trends, and status flags for nodes that warrant attention. Outpost is the per-node view: activity over time for one specific node, useful when you want to understand a particular node’s behavior rather than the whole network at once.

For understanding how your network’s topology is being built from the packets your observers record, From Radio to Map walks through the ingest pipeline in detail.