It is and it isnt, you do need to put in effort and manage expectations with meshnets (which makes it a hard sell for normies and people without a direct need). I was at DefCon a few weeks ago with my nerd herd and we functionally only used Meshtastic for our coms for the entire conference. On a few occasions I had to set the hop count to 5-7 but that was to get messages into or out of the main building. Once in the main hall (and using the cons firmware because it needed to default to shorter chirps to not saturate the airwaves) it worked just fine and our fleet of nodes was working perfectly.
Do note that there were ~2500 meshtastic nodes inside a convention hall, and electromagnetically speaking, that was probably the most chaotic place west of the mississippi that week.
As for out in the wild, Ive set up a small fleet of repeaters around town and can send longer range signals a quite a long distance away. Any further communication would require enabling MQTT, setting up servers and building real infrastructure. Thats a whole other can of worms I dont have the time to do yet.
All of them live at peoples houses (so access to a normal power source) and either have some small lithium cell or an 18650. Only expirmenting with small solar panels and you need larger ones to run repeaters or routers as they are more active.
It is and it isnt, you do need to put in effort and manage expectations with meshnets (which makes it a hard sell for normies and people without a direct need). I was at DefCon a few weeks ago with my nerd herd and we functionally only used Meshtastic for our coms for the entire conference. On a few occasions I had to set the hop count to 5-7 but that was to get messages into or out of the main building. Once in the main hall (and using the cons firmware because it needed to default to shorter chirps to not saturate the airwaves) it worked just fine and our fleet of nodes was working perfectly.
Do note that there were ~2500 meshtastic nodes inside a convention hall, and electromagnetically speaking, that was probably the most chaotic place west of the mississippi that week.
As for out in the wild, Ive set up a small fleet of repeaters around town and can send longer range signals a quite a long distance away. Any further communication would require enabling MQTT, setting up servers and building real infrastructure. Thats a whole other can of worms I dont have the time to do yet.
how do you power them?
All of them live at peoples houses (so access to a normal power source) and either have some small lithium cell or an 18650. Only expirmenting with small solar panels and you need larger ones to run repeaters or routers as they are more active.