I played around with it a few years ago, neat for off-gird basic text messaging but ultimately hampered by low bandwidth. I put one up on my chimney and got about a mile of range in dense suburban terrain, like any RF tech height and gain is your friend. The idea was to ultimately to install a chain of solar powered LORA units along a mountain range right outside of town to create a network for me and my friends if SHTF but I moved before I got around to doing it. What I want to build now are MANET radios, same idea but much more capable hardware, similar to what the .mil currently uses.

If you live in the third world really useful when there are power outages and you want to check on your family for thieves or healthcare related stuff like making sure the oxygen or meds are sorted.


If you live in a civilized place you might want to use it for LARP if you love fallout and fantasize about the end of the world or use it for drug smuggling.

>buy the microcontrollers with the LORA module on it from chink express
>get android phones on bluetooth to the microcontroller so we can send text to each other
>I use an old raspberry pi with the lora hat + an old power bank and we take a bike or a walk to the closest antenna and just leave it as a node it lasts me like 3 days

I get really lucky cause that node reaches everyone I need to talk to and suffices for me needs but I have a plan b in case my relatives cant reach my node to have a shit laptop with an extra lora microcontroller and leave buried next to an antenna close to theirs so we can have a backup network.


Besides this I honestly dont know the reason meshtastic exists, my spurious guess must be something made by a 3 letter intel agency to use publicly to share data they just make it public to normalize it to the rest of the population otherwise it would stick out too much to have this sort of comms going on either this frequency, best reason you have to use it in europe is you probably dont need a radio faggotator licence.

I really love meshtastic cause it saves using a Baofeng to speak with people cause if there is an actual power outtage where I live all the fucking frequencies blow up of people speaking to each other.