Thank you for your thoughts Steve.? I've been interested in Meshtastic for about a year and finally bought two Heltec v3 devices off of Etsy, as well as some better antennas from "Garth" who makes a lot of the solar units and seems to be pretty well regarded on the Mesh discord.? I've also joined the local SoCal Mesh group as well, which has had some interesting experiments and is actively building out a solar repeater system.? Where I live there are several repeaters installed on the towers that house our amateur radio/telecom/county services radio systems, so there is some real good coverage.
I'm currently waiting on a case for one of the "Blackberry" style units.? I have the RAK board, keyboard, battery, and a third party GPS, now just waiting on the case which comes with an SMA connector for an external antenna.
I like it because with limited training I can give a unit to someone and have encrypted comms with them and they don't need a license.? With the "MeshBerries" (my term for the Lilygo T-Deck Blackberry looking units), you can just hand one to someone and go.? No phone sync needed.
I've gotten messages from San Diego, CA all the way up here near Malibu, CA (DM04 land), with the repeating and I've read reports of mesh units connecting over 200km away from each other in the UK.? Granted one was on a SOTA type site and the other was in a hot air balloon, but for the tiny devices they have and running less output power than a QRP rig, that's pretty impressive!
I think some of the DoS issues and flooding can be controlled with sub-channels.
The downsides: The Heltecs I have, on a full charge, lasted maybe 6 hours.? Pretty much have to keep them plugged in all day.? Second downside, not a whole lot of people locally to talk to.? Send a message and hope you get a response.? But there are plenty of nodes, so that's useful.
My use case - I have a group of prepper friends who would like to communicate over a large regional area in the event of an earthquake or other major disaster to make sure everyone is OK.? We're assuming that cell phones and tools like Signal are down (which they were during one of our more recent fires when a major fiberoptic line got severed by a dozer).? Some are hams, but not everyone wants to go that route and a General class would be needed.? These look like viable options.? I'm also trying to get them on GMRS as well as some of those repeaters may have range, though it appears the MyGMRS site does not always have accurate range calculations.
In a PACE plan, Mesh is likely to be the E with HF and GMRS as the A and C, respectively.? On the bright side, in our group each unique geographic region (we have three) has at least one General ham in it that can gather and relay information locally with VHF/UHF/GMRS
Ryan Huggins