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Onboarding a New Region

This guide walks through requesting a new MeshMapper region for your local mesh.

All region approvals are at the discretion of the MeshMapper administration team. Sometimes working with an existing region is a better fit than creating a new one.

Region Guidelines

The MeshMapper team uses these guidelines when reviewing a new region or a boundary change:

  1. Airport code: Use a recognizable airport with scheduled commercial passenger service as the region's code.
  2. Size: Size the region by practical driving access. Major hubs can cover a larger area where that makes sense.
  3. Borders: Follow county lines where possible. Avoid overlaps and unassigned gaps between neighboring regions.
  4. Exceptions: Legacy regions and unusually large, remote mesh networks may be handled differently.
  5. Community, not just an airport: Having an airport isn't enough reason for a separate region. How the local MeshCore community is organized, and which observers are available, matter too.

Before You Start

  • No existing region: Your area must not already be substantially covered by another region. Regions within regions are not allowed.
  • No nearby neighbor that could expand: If a nearby region could reasonably be expanded to cover your area, that's preferred. A new region makes sense when your mesh is clearly separate (e.g. distance or terrain that blocks RF). If that's your case, explain why in Additional Notes.
  • An MQTT observer: You need at least one (preferably 2-3) observer nodes online in your area, connected to the MeshMapper MQTT broker. Observers are the "ears" of the map. See MeshMapper MQTT Setup.

Starting a Request

Open the onboarding form from meshmapper.net:

The form walks you through five steps: Code → Region → Boundary → Mesh → Submit.

1. Code

Search for your city, airport, or code and pick your region's IATA airport code. It becomes your region's address (e.g. yow.meshmapper.net). Codes already in use are greyed out, and nearby available codes are suggested.

Having an IATA code doesn't by itself make an airport suitable. Prefer a recognizable airport with scheduled commercial passenger service, reasonably close to your region, over military or general aviation airfields. See Region Guidelines.

2. Region

Confirm the Country and Region Name (filled in from the airport you picked). The name is what people see in the region list, e.g. "Ottawa, CA".

3. Boundary

MeshMapper builds your boundary from OpenStreetMap borders.

  1. Drag the pin onto your region. Picking a code moves the map, but not the pin, so make sure you drag it.
  2. The borders around the pin load automatically (or press Load Boundary). Choose a level: State/Prov, County (default), or Local (municipality, where available).
  3. Click the green areas you want to include. Use the arrow buttons around the pin to load more areas.
  4. Press Continue to merge your selection into one boundary.

On the map, purple is existing regions, green is areas you can pick, and cyan is your selection. Areas that belong to another region can't be picked, and your boundary can't overlap an existing region.

Size the region by practical driving access, follow county lines where possible, and avoid gaps or overlaps with neighboring regions. Coordinate with them. The boundary can be changed later as your network grows.

Custom boundaries

Drawing or importing your own GeoJSON (under Advanced Mapping) is only accepted in special circumstances. If you think you need one, explain why in Additional Notes. See Region Boundaries.

4. Mesh

Public Channels: List any public channels your mesh uses besides #public (e.g. Chat, Emergency). The app listens on these channels while wardriving, so more channels means more packets get decoded and verified.

Regions/Scopes: We highly recommend your area scope its wardriving traffic. However, if scopes aren't set up on the repeaters in your mesh, every ping will show as a drop.

5. Submit

  • E-Mail Address (required).
  • Link Discord (optional, recommended): get status updates and region alerts by Discord DM.
  • Volunteer as Region Administrator (optional, recommended): see below.
  • Additional Notes: anything the team should know, including why an exception to the prerequisites should be made.

Volunteer as Region Administrator

Tick Volunteer as Region Administrator to become your region's admin. Admins:

  • manage their region's data and settings,
  • support local wardrivers and answer questions about the map,
  • are an active point of contact for their mesh community.

You must be genuinely active in your local mesh community. Once you accept, you're listed publicly as an admin on your region's map.

When your region is approved, you'll get an invite by email, or by Discord DM if you linked Discord. Sign in or create a MeshMapper account and accept it. That one account signs you in to both the portal and your region's admin panel.

Stay active

Admins who don't sign in to the admin panel for more than 90 days may be marked inactive or have their access removed. Inactive admins aren't consulted on changes to their region, and new admins may be added if a region has no active admins.

After You Submit

  1. Observer check: MeshMapper checks that an observer is reporting from your region's code. This takes up to 5 minutes once your observer is online.
  2. Review: The MeshMapper team reviews the request (name, boundary, conflicts with other regions, your notes).
  3. Go live: Once approved, your region is live. Repeaters and pings can take up to 5 minutes to appear on the map.

While your request is pending, https://<code>.meshmapper.net shows its status, including whether an observer has been detected. You can also ask the Discord bot: @MeshMapper !status <code>. If you linked Discord, you'll get DMs as your request moves along.

Warning

Requests with no detected observer after 3 days are automatically deleted. You'll get reminders by email (and Discord, if linked) until then.