Companion node never appears in repeater Neighbours list

[radekdvorsky-coder]

Hello,

I have a question about MeshCore routing behavior.

My setup:

Aifel RPT Kaznějov – Repeater (v1.15, soon 1.16 LTO)
Aifel-companion-Kaznějov – Companion (v1.16)
DAN-Xiao_nrf52 – Repeater (v1.16)

The Companion has an excellent direct link to my repeater (Trace works both ways, about +12 dB SNR).

However, my repeater never lists the Companion in its Neighbours list. It only shows the remote DAN repeater.

As a result, when I reduce Companion TX power so that it can no longer reach DAN directly, messages are not routed through my repeater, even though the Companion has a good direct link to it.

My question is:

Is it expected that Companion nodes are never added to a repeater's Neighbours table, or is this a bug?

If it is expected behavior, how should a Companion use a nearby repeater as its preferred first hop when a direct path to the destination is unavailable?

Thank you.

[jschrempp]

Do you try to reach DAN with Flood routing?

[radekdvorsky-coder]

YES

[liamcottle]

Is it expected that Companion nodes are never added to a repeater's Neighbours table, or is this a bug?

This is correct behaviour. Repeater neighbours list only shows repeaters. It's intended to show what repeaters can link with each other.

If it is expected behavior, how should a Companion use a nearby repeater as its preferred first hop when a direct path to the destination is unavailable?

You can manually set a path in the MeshCore App to go through a specific repeater, but this is set on a per contact basis.

However, you don't need to do this, as the app will fallback to flood routing to discover a usable path, and once that's established it will use that path from that point forwards.