Meshtastic Range Planner — How Far Will My Nodes Reach? (Link-Budget Bands)

“How far will my nodes reach?” is the first question every Meshtastic deployment has to answer — and the honest answer is never a single number. Range is set by the link budget: how many decibels of path loss your radio can absorb before the signal falls below the receiver’s sensitivity. Every modem preset publishes a link budget (see D-Central’s Meshtastic modem-presets dataset; the Meshtastic figures assume 22 dBm transmit power and 0 dBi antennas), and your real TX power, antenna gains, cable losses and fade margin move that budget up or down.

This planner converts your maximum allowable path loss into a range band per environment using the standard log-distance path-loss model — free space, rural, suburban and dense urban/forest each get a typical and an optimistic bound — and caps every band at the radio horizon for your antenna heights. Terrain, Fresnel clearance and antenna height dominate real range: treat the output as a planning estimate, not a guarantee.

Max allowable path loss (MAPL):
  MAPL = preset link budget − 22 dBm + your TX power
         + TX antenna gain + RX antenna gain − cable losses
  (Meshtastic's published link budgets assume 22 dBm TX and 0 dBi antennas,
   so the budget is first re-based to your actual TX power.)

Log-distance path-loss model (d0 = 1 m reference):
  PL(d) = PL(1 m) + 10 · n · log10(d)
  PL(1 m) = 20·log10(f/MHz) − 27.55   (free-space loss at 1 m)
  → d = 10^((MAPL − fade margin − PL(1 m)) / (10·n))

Radio horizon (4/3-Earth approximation), h in metres:
  d_horizon ≈ 4.12 · (√h1 + √h2) km   — every band is capped here.

Path-loss exponents n (standard log-distance planning values):
  free space 2.0 · rural/open 2.7–3.0 · suburban 3.0–3.5 · dense urban/forest 3.5–4.0

Reference check — Long Fast (153 dB budget), 22 dBm TX, 2 dBi both ends,
0.5 dB loss, 10 dB fade margin, 915 MHz, antennas at 2 m:
  MAPL = 156.5 dB · after margin = 146.5 dB · PL(1 m) = 31.68 dB
  Suburban band ≈ 1.9–6.7 km · radio horizon ≈ 11.7 km

Planner vs. the quick range calculator

D-Central publishes two complementary range tools. The Meshtastic range calculator gives a fast single-link estimate from the Friis free-space equation scaled by a terrain factor — good for a first sanity check. This planner goes a step further: it works from the preset’s published link budget and the log-distance path-loss model, so instead of one number you get an honest band per environment, plus the radio-horizon ceiling your antenna heights impose. When the two tools disagree, trust the band, then trust a field test over both.

Making the estimate real

Three things move real-world range more than any preset change: height (raising either antenna clears obstructions and pushes the radio horizon out), line-of-sight (a single hill or building row can cost more dB than your entire fade margin), and antenna quality (a well-matched antenna with short, low-loss cable beats a high-gain figure on a spec sheet). Once a link closes, check whether your traffic actually fits the channel with the LoRa airtime & duty-cycle calculator — long-range presets buy distance by burning airtime.

Picking hardware? The Meshtastic & LoRa device database compares 915 MHz boards, and the Sovereign Mesh hardware collection has ready-to-deploy nodes. For why any of this matters — building communications that keep working when the internet doesn’t — start with mesh comms for when the internet dies and the Sovereign Mesh hub.