Salish Mesh ~ Local channels and regions used on Salish Mesh

What are local channels?

Local channels are usually in the form of hashtag channels. These are an easy way to share a private channel with others. It is important to remember that anyone can join the channel if they use the same hashtag, i.e. #test.

That said it's easy to tell someone over the mesh, hey join #southisland, and they will be able to click the tag and join the channel.

Channels in use around the Salish Mesh area

• #salishmesh: general discussion, operators
• #bc: regional general discussion
• #southisland: greater Victoria area users and operators
• #vancouver
• #ubc
• #bot-van: some users in Vancouver operate a number of bots available here
• #testing: if you want to test you new setup or play with bots
• #emergency: reserved for emergency notification. Shared across PNW

How to add them

If you see a hashtag in chat using the official app you can click it to join the channel.

Otherwise you can join or even create your own:

• Liam's App: click the three dot menu, top right, and click add channel then join a hashtag channel.
• Meshcore Open: Navigate to the channels page, click the plus button, then join a hashtag channel.

What are regions?

Regions are named scopes for traffic.

A user can optionally scope their traffic for a given channel to a region.

What this means is if a user say's scope the public channel to the region #bc, then only repeaters who explicitly allow flood traffic scoped the #bc will forward that traffic. In this way users and repeater operators can limit the area to which certain traffic will flood to.

Regions in use around the Salish Mesh Area

It's very early days and most repeaters still allow un-scoped flood traffic, which means you don't need to scope traffic yet. That said, a number of repeater owners have begun to experiment with regions and so far the following are allowed: #bc, #swbc, #southisland and #salishmesh but this one might not make sense with the others already covering most of it.

How to add a scope to a channel

You can use anything you like for a scope, so you can have local area scopes between friends or neighboring repeaters etc. The scope may start with a #, and must be lower case and may contain numbers and -.

• Liam's App: click the three dot menu, top right, and click Set Region Scope then add a scope if the one you want is not listed, otherwise click the scope you want to set. To remove the scope you can click the header where it shows the current scope and set it to none.
• Meshcore Open: coming soon