Antenna configurations do vary greatly and are less critical for receive only. SDR would allow you to receive only. Might help adoption if you had a set up that would work out of the gate for the nonhams. And would motivate them to get a license. I wonder if you could do something like PSKreporter. If there is a firewall behind a country you only need to use one HF receiver to receive the data and then upload behind the "firewall" that way someone in a community only needs an SDR and then they can upload to a local Internet or meshtastic type system. I'm just spit balling ideas. I'm excited about what you are doing.