Hey folks I recently saw a node pop up that was just shy of 1000 miles away. I wanted to double check my understanding of how the location of nodes is determined.
Theoretically this person could have set the lat/long hard coded in the settings and could be shown anywhere. I am assuming that is what happened here as that sort of distance seems crazy to me. They did have 7 hops to get to me but even then I am dubious.
Thinking about this more I am guessing MQTT could be at play as well and I need to do some more reading there.
Could be any or all of that, yeah. You can also set the level of precision for your reported location, but I don’t think even the lowest precision settings would put it 1,000 miles away.
I live near-ish to an airport, and I’ll occasionally see nodes that are 1 or 2 hops and 100-200+ miles away. Best I can tell, the airborne node is legit relaying those which I think is pretty cool. Not really useful, but cool.