Help Liberty Hill stay connected when the towers go down.
Liberty Hill Mesh is a free, non-commercial text network built from small solar-powered radios on rooftops, poles, and hilltops. It works when cell service does not, and every other day too. Nobody owns it. Everybody does.
How far one node reaches depends on where it sits. A valley floor covers the neighborhood. A ridgetop covers the county.
What it is
A mesh is a network with no center. Each radio hears its neighbors and passes messages along, so a text from one side of town hops radio to radio until it lands.
- Free and non-commercial
- There is no company behind Liberty Hill Mesh, no account to create, and nothing to subscribe to. The radios are cheap, the software is open source, and the airwaves are license-free.
- Owned by everyone
- Every node is hosted by a neighbor, a business, a church, or a ranch. Together those nodes are the network. No single person controls it, and no single failure takes it down.
- Built for the bad days, used on the good ones
- After a storm, an ice event, a flood, or a grid outage, cell towers go dark. Mesh nodes run on sunlight and keep passing messages so neighbors can check on each other. The rest of the year it is how you text a friend across town with no phone plan, or from a ranch with no bars. Everyday use is what keeps it healthy.
How it works
Nodes on high ground
Small solar-powered repeaters sit on barn roofs, light poles, chimneys, and hilltops. Each one relays what it hears to the next. These are the nodes we ask property owners to host.
A radio in your pocket
You carry a small LoRa radio, about the size of a key fob or a deck of cards. It pairs to your phone over Bluetooth, the same way headphones do.
The MeshCore app
You type a message in the free MeshCore app. Your radio sends it to the nearest node, and the mesh carries it the rest of the way, hop by hop, to the person or channel you picked.
Ways to help
- Host a node
Got a roof, a pole, a barn, or a parking lot light pole with a view? A node costs you nothing, needs no power, and needs no wiring.
- Carry a radio
Every radio on the mesh makes it stronger and more useful. A capable device runs about the price of a tank of gas.
- Join the Facebook group
Support, radio talk, and news about new nodes. It is the easiest place to reach us, and the best place to tell your HOA, your church, or the business owner down the road about the mesh.
One mesh, many communities
Liberty Hill Mesh is one part of a single, much larger mesh. Volunteers from Killeen to San Antonio, including Austin Mesh, put up nodes and carry radios on the same network, and a message can already travel that whole distance with no cell service in between. Every community that adds nodes improves coverage for everyone. There is no membership. If you have a radio, you are part of it.
Closer to home, we are in the process of partnering with the City of Liberty Hill to add coverage across the city limits and the surrounding area, at no cost to taxpayers.