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).

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.

Yeah, after thinking about it 1w will probably be overkill, since the two places I can run base stations right now are not very well located. If I get a chance to put one on a hilltop I might go 1w with a big antenna for receive performance, but not right now.

I’ll still be able to talk to other mesh users.

But you have to have other friends that you know who are mesh users, correct? It's not like you can just go on and find people who you can communicate with, right? Or wrong? I want to use this and I want it to be a thing, but I don't have one person I know who would be interested in doing this with me! lol

I live in a US city of half a million people, is there a use case for this or do you think it's mostly for rural use?

Honestly, I’m getting more and more militant about open source.

Me too. It all started when I switched to Linux...lol

I'm very close to biting the bullet and getting a cheap Linux phone.

There is a public channel that you can use to broadcast to everyone on the local mesh. My area mostly uses it for a pinboard to talk about hardware deployments but it's gaining speed.

It actually works better in metros with denser mesh nets with lots of nodes, transmitting between nodes is more reliable that way.

Its main use is in direct messaging other nodes held by friends. Those nodes can also send telemetry back to the mesh like live GPS tracking, weather info, signal quality, etc. Nodes can also be set up like terminals or BBS systems that you message like a primitive internet thats more persistent than the IM system.

The big key is meshtastic uses commercial LoRa radio gear that is supported by other projects, like MeshCore or Reticulum. So you are not locked in to any one mesh system if you buy a LoRa radio kit.

Thank you!