Community
A hurricane-season checklist for your mesh setup
Practical steps to get your node — and your household — ready before the next storm knocks out cell service.
Cell networks in Puerto Rico have gone down for days to weeks after major storms more than once. A Meshtastic setup won’t replace emergency services, but it can keep you in contact with neighbors and family when nothing else works. Here’s a pre-season checklist worth going through now, not during the storm.
Before the season starts
- Charge and test every device you own. A radio that’s been in a drawer since last year needs a firmware check and a full charge cycle before you trust it.
- Confirm your region and channel settings haven’t drifted — see Getting Started → Configuring your region.
- Write down (on paper) the node names and channel details you’d want family members to use. Don’t rely on a phone that might be dead when you need this.
- Identify a backup power plan for your home node — even a small power bank buys days of runtime for a low-power radio.
During an outage
- Keep messages short. Airtime is shared; a mesh flooded with long messages helps no one, including you.
- Share your status, not just chatter. A quick “OK, home, no injuries” on a known channel is more useful to a search-and-rescue-minded neighbor than a long message.
- Don’t rely on a single node. If you know a neighbor or community member with a node, confirm you can both reach the same channel before you need to.
After the storm
- Report what worked and what didn’t. Coverage gaps found the hard way during a real event are exactly the information that improves Puerto Rico Mesh planning for next time.
- Consider a more permanent installation if a temporary setup proved its worth — see Recommended Hardware → Rooftop / High Elevation Nodes.
This is community guidance, not an emergency management plan. Follow official guidance from Puerto Rico’s emergency management agencies for anything safety-critical — Meshtastic is a communication tool, not a substitute for it.