Room Servers with repeat not treated as repeaters for pathing and collisions.

[MrPatzy]

I have a couple room servers, one at work, a stationary hardwired Heltec V3, and a mobile room.server in my vehicle, RAK 19007. My work is downtown so I wanted to let people near by have a place for messages, and same with my car, but also to use the store and forward feature for if I miss messages during my commute. Additionally, I need(ed) my mobile room server to repeat just to get a signal out of my office with a hope at getting to the wider mesh. Its relatively crucial for my MC operations.

Anyways ive found that when a message is passed through a room server, when looking at the message path, the hop is labeled as unknown. Seems like if they're sending adverts, they should be able to be labeled. Testing today showed hops going through my stationary node were labeled as unknown even though its in my contacts, and I Remote admin that server from my companion.

Further complication, my mobile room server has a ID collision with a solar repeater in the area. So because room servers are unknown, MeshCore is labeling the hop with the solar repeater instead. That repeater is a few cities away from where I was testing, and doesnt have LOS into the downtown area. Particularly odd, because in the same message path, I came across a different collision, and they were both repeaters, and the app identified that and showed a message, but didnt do so for the room server/repeater collision.

So here you can see the conflict for the fd hop, and the second screenshot is the app telling me which of my contacts have the collision. The e7 hop however doesnt show that message. The e7 repeater that is listed is the one way out of range that my mobile room server has a collision with. There is nothing listed as to a possible collision, and makes it seem like the message is popping way out of the city to come right back.

I dont think this is how room servers are meant to be treated although I do understand that they occupy a Grey area between repeater and companion. I don't know what the right solution is, but this behavior is hard for understanding mesh pathing especially as MC has taken off in my area in 2026.