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.
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.
