I love the idea of #meshtastic but is there any real usecase for the continental united states?
I suppose if you don't have cell service (rural America) it would work great.
Discussion
- You want to connect devices over moderate distances
- You want to share files with friends nearby without paying for data
- You want to communicate locally without your ISP, five TLAs and seven thousand offshore marketers cyberstalking you.
- You want to communicate locally even if an "internet kill switch" has been triggered, or some other hopefully temporary disaster has hit your ISP
All of this, and building an open, meshed based, permission-less network is the only way forward, IMO.
Yeah, it's definitely best used in places like the US where even if you lose all internet and cellphone signal (tornado or something?) you can still message as long as you're within range of another unit. As it's using radio not WiFi/cell towers.
The unit I have on my roof is marked as a router/client so it will pass messages through to others making me the middle man. Which is fine by me. Costs nothing to do it.
I don't have many nodes near me, but I know some people are setting up self sufficient nodes (units with solar charged batteries and the like) in certain areas. The higher the better.
I'm just messing about with it, as we don't have tornados out earthquakes here in the UK.
Even with tiny antennas and low antennas I was getting distances of about 1km.
Definitely a good thing to have it things go down. Literally!