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.
In meshtastic, you can manually set the location with long/lat.
Ive seen it where people dont update that while they go on trips.
Also there is MQTT so if the node can communicate with the internet, its possible.