So, I've been watching a few intros on meshtastic, just to get the basics down, but I believe my situation requires a proper long term plan. Basically, I live practictally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains, and there are unlikely to be any other meshtastic nodes around, so I will probably need a setup that is partially based on repeaters,

I'm thinking something like this, where my entry into the ordeal is done in multiple stages. It is my understanding that diving into meshtastic quickly becomes an addiction and a hunt for more nodes, and I don't see this as a problem in itself, I just want to figure out what to expect in terms of neighboring nodes.

1. Simple handheld device. Nothing fancy. Something simple and cheap to bring with me when I'm traveling. While I doubt I'll be able to see any nodes at home, I travel often, so it would still be usable and hopefully fun to toy around with.

2. Semi-permanent car install for longer range. Partially as a repeater for my handheld radio, and partially to log and see where I can find "neighbors". As a lot of the aforementioned travel is done by car, I think this is a viable strategy in preparation for step 3.

3. Installing a solar powered repeater on a nearby mountain.
   So, if I find out that I do have other radios not too far away, I think it's safe to say that I will need a repeater or two on one of the mountains that surround me. We're talking solar panels, and something that can run basically unattended. Long range is key here.

4. If the above work and I end up linking to a larger pool of nodes, then I might go for something fancier at home.

How much does this strategy make sense?

UPDATE: A wisblock starter kit is now on its way. Should enable me to do some research and data collection, and I'll go from there. I'm willing to bet that I need to hike this 1200m summit nearby this summer, tho.

I am in a similar scenario as you are living in a more rural location. I started with hand held devices that I would take in my car to see if it was worthwhile to continue exploring. I ended up finding many people around me but I could not reach them from my house. I ended up using an old TV antenna at my house to run a node up on that gave me access to my broader community. I live in the flat Midwest so went with a high DB antenna and it has worked great.

My thoughts are nix the dedicated car based module and go straight to a high location after hand held. Height is king for Meshtastic.

My last note is be aware of antennas you use as higher DB is not always the best. Higher DB means the sensitivity of the antena becomes flatter and more perpendicular to the horizon(in standard installations) where as lower DB radiates in a big bubble.

So if you are in very mountainous terrain very high DB antennas are not always best as they do not handle elevation changes great but rather blast out to the horizon which may not be useful. Also if you have a hill blocking you, your are out of luck. Think of Meshtastic as basically line of sight.

If you have any questions fire away and I can share what I know, I am not an expert by any means but I have got my hands dirty.

One addition, you do not have to break the bank on any of this. If you are tech savvy and can do basic soldering I would suggest piecing your nodes together yourself. If you are looking at the 100 dollar solar nodes you can do that for much much cheaper yourself with a bit of work.

I do a lot of hobby electronics, so building a repeater more or less from scratch is the plan, yes.

I still think the car setup is needed, at least temporarily until I've found some potential neighbors that I can reach with a repeater. I very much doubt I'll be able to reach anyone without them, as I live here:

...gotta get over those mountains. And that picture was taken from one of the few locations reachable by car, and I'm willing to bet better positions can be reached by foot. But NFW I'm hiking all the way up there just to test - I wanna map out other nodes in the region first.

EDIT: Unless needed later, the car setup might be repurposed as a rooftop repeater so I can reach a summit repeater from my pocket node.

Beautiful picture. My car setup if my handheld on my dash and a USB feeding it power if it needs to recharge. It has worked well for me

How easy is it to wire in a pocket node to a laptop for datalogging? While the form factor isn't much of an issue (I intend to print my own case), I was wondering what sort of I/O protocol (if any) these devices usually support.

Have you had a look at meshmap.net? People voluntarily add themselves to the MQTT server and have their locations put on the map with some ambiguity. And you can at least see if anybody is voluntarily adding themselves and they are close to you.

Just because you don't find anybody on that map doesn't mean there's not anybody close. It just means that they haven't volunteered to put themselves on the map. For example, in my area, I generally see between 9 and 15 nodes, and yet only two of them are on the map. So if you just relied on the map, you would think it's way more dead than it actually is.

There are a couple of mapped ones "nearby". Two hours drive, and a couple of mountain ranges in between. I should be able to reach them with a mountaintop repeater or two. I'll see what else is nearby (if anything) and plan from there, once my pocket unit arrives.

There is a python CLI you should look into. This gets out of my comfort zone so likely not using the right terminology but you can connect via serial and they will dump very detailed logs over that connection. I am not sure if those detailed logs are saved though, or you would need to capture live.

I have used this for troubleshooting but there is loads of information being passed over.

Dumping live serial is fine. In fact, I think that might be easiest since I'll be dumping NMEA strings for positioning at the same time. Should make it easier to parse and map later on.

I've been doing LoRa for the better part of a year, in a fairly active Midwest city (checking now, my SeeedStudio T1000-e can see ~145 nodes (although most are via MQTT - more on that in a minute).

I also have two Muzi works h2t hand held nodes - one is connected to my home wifi with a local MQTT server configured as client_base which allows my non-wifi nodes to relay through it to reach the mesh.

Lastly, I just put up a SensCAP Solar P1 Pro node on my roof.

It's a lot, but basically the heltec running client_base stays plugged in at my house, the second heltec comes with me in the car, and the t1000e stays on my person. The Meshtastic android and iOS apps are really good, the former is what I'll use to send/receive messages for whichever node I'm using.

One word of caution, that mountain solar node may need software updates to keep running smoothly without messing with the mesh, and updates remotely (over Bluetooth) are sketchy at best.

Aside from that, I say go for it. The mountain node would probably be in router mode to encourage other nodes to bounce through it - you'll want to tweak settings to make sure it performs optimally.

Lastly MQTT... A lot of purists frown on MQTT because it kind of goes against the whole "wireless infrastructure only" mindset. But until there's enough coverage with LoRa nodes, MQTT can bridge that gap and connect isolated pockets to a larger mesh.

Imma have to do some research into how to build a viable mountain solar node, then. It'll only be physically accessible during summer and in nice weather. Maybe I can hack together something that updates the firmware via USB once a month or something - sounds like an interesting challenge doable with digikey supplies I already have.

From what I remember reading, most phones with USBC can mount the node when in programming mode and you can drag-n-drop the update bin. Feasibly, an update wouldn’t require any extra device being lugged up the mountain.