Meshtastic altitude bug mixes feet and meters in telemetry displays
A May 30 Meshtastic bug showed altitude as feet in one place and meters in another, with MQTT and clients disagreeing on the same node.
A bad altitude readout is more than a cosmetic nuisance when Meshtastic is carrying hiking tracks, balloon telemetry, fixed relay plans, or after-action logs. A bug filed on May 30 against meshtastic/firmware exposed exactly that kind of drift: on Imperial displays, GPS altitude was still being handled as meters in parts of the interface, which can turn a simple position check into a bad deployment decision.
The report used v2.7.24.472b14c on a Heltec V4 running headless over Wi-Fi and accessed through the web client, Android, and serial USB. The setup was specific: the node used a manually specified position instead of live GPS, and altitude was set to 55 feet. The node details page then showed 180 feet, a number that lines up suspiciously with a value being treated as meters rather than feet. When the altitude was changed to 17 meters, the node details matched, but the web client still displayed 17 meters instead of 55 feet. That same value also propagated into MQTT telemetry.
That makes this a data-integrity problem, not just a display bug. If the web client, Android app, serial output, and MQTT bridge do not agree on altitude units, Meshtastic no longer has one clean source of truth. Anyone using altitude to judge a ridge-top relay site, confirm a balloon’s climb, or sort through tracker logs after a field run can end up chasing the wrong number. It also means dashboards and automation built on MQTT may be inheriting the mismatch instead of just showing it.
The practical check is simple: compare the altitude shown in the node details page, the web client, Android, serial USB, and MQTT output before treating the number as final. If Imperial display units are enabled, watch for values that look converted in one place and raw in another, especially on manually entered positions. Until a firmware fix lands, keeping altitude in meters is the safer cross-check, because the report showed 17 meters staying consistent where 55 feet did not. For anyone depending on Meshtastic for field work, that unit mismatch is the kind of quiet bug that can send the wrong lesson straight into the logbook.
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