I have a t-deck that I built. I had to do some soldering. To be honest I haven't messed with it to much after setting it up a year ago. There wasn't much activity in my area and none of my family was interested. Range is line of sight to another node that can relay the message. If I were to do it again or try to get a family member onboarded I would probably get something pre-built from Etsy.

Well I’d recommend start out with something like a heltec to learn with before spending a lot of money on something that turns out to be too technical or not widely used in your area, last I checked, you could get a two pack for around $50 on Amazon. As far as setting up… I spent about 3-4 hours YouTubing it until I was able to get mine set up. I found that I was able to get about a mile between both my heltec nodes without other relays or repeaters… and as far as I’ve found, there are still no others within range of my town… theoretically, as long as you keep line of sight with a node, it should connect and I believe (have to look to be certain) you can bounce the signal through 5 or 8 nodes to relay it for distance. I have heard of people connecting with other nodes 90 miles away, but it all depends on signal. And YouTube has been a better teacher than any of the actual meshtastic websites. I used to drive around the Lansing, Michigan last year with one of mine in my delivery truck trying to find other nodes, but never got any hits. Since then I’ve seen on the Michigan discord server that a couple nodes are now in downtown so I need to see what I can find with mine now again.

1. SeeedStudio SenseCAP T1000-E

2. Not very for the defaults, some more for custom channels, etc

3 line of sight. Height is might. Handheld maybe a couple miles direct without hops, from a plane hundreds of miles