True! And with the new Client_Base :D

It starts off as a “cheap” hobby, then you look a year later and you are buried in devices.

The only issue you may have with the 1W is that they will be able to send to nodes that will probably not be able to contact you back. Because they are lower power.

So while you may be able to send really well, receiving may be a bit more difficult.

Ive heard of people saying that the 1W will muddy up the radio space since its basically one node “screaming” over others. Im not 100% buying it as 1W is still pretty quiet compared to other electronics in other spectrum. But thought I would mention it.

I usually direct people over to helteks because they are cheap and you can get 2 of them in the same box. For more info you can check out the official meshtastic site.

Or check out https://rootaccess.org/wiki/Meshtastic/rev447/#-quickstart

If you go with the defaults at least at first, you can see if its something you want to invest your time into. Worst case, you have a couple of these things you can give out to a couple of ham friends. You can go pretty deep with the hobby, but its fun (in my opinion).

Do you have solar setup or is it direct connect within the house?

I hope at some point, both will do interop. Its causing a bit of a splintering of the community…which really doesnt need to happen (mostly on discord and reddit from what I have been seeing). We are so small to begin with. And its not the devs doing it, it seems to be the community themselves. Which is again unfortunate.

Its like a worse pager system. But it does not use the internet or anything centralized. It makes it look like texting on apps.

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.

Last year we had around 20ish. So yeah, lots more people.

Local city its at 30 and with mqtt its over 200ish. Its exploding. Kinda.