So, the Great House Hunt is back on in earnest finally, and this weekend the Girls and I will be checking out some houses in Bristol. That’s a much larger town west of Hartford that happens to be smack dab in the middle of a Mestastic/Meshcore signal corridor that runs north from New Haven, CT all the way up into Maine, basically following the 91. (linguistic note: in New England, they call expressways by just the number, while in the SouthWest, we insert “the” in front of the number, and we call them “freeways”. “Go South on Eight” a Nutmegger says, while “Go down THE OCHO” is what I default to.) 
What is this “Meshtastic/Meshcore” thing? Well, they are two slightly different things, but in a nutshell, it is an open source, community built off-grid communication network using low-powered, low frequency radio to send text messages. It’s designed for setting up emergency communications quickly in places or situations where power and cell service are down, but since anyone can toss up a stand-alone solar-powered repeater anywhere that just sits there and relays traffic 24/7, many networks have become permanent infrastructure in certain areas, extending the range and reliability across cities and even connecting cities and states. 
Meshtastic and Meshcore are just different software variations of the same concept, and both run on the same radios – you can swap the firmware on the radios easily to use the network you prefer. Generally speaking Mestastic is intended for emergency communications and works best with relatively small networks and not a lot of users. Meshcore was developed later and implements more robust protocols allowing larger networks and longer distance with more hops between nodes. They don’t talk to each other, so it’s a matter of choice which you go with. 
Anyway, I bought a couple of cheap WIO Tracker L1 kits and built the basic pair of radios so I could play around with it and do a little wardriving where we’re house hunting. I want to scope out what the off-grid comms look like in the area we end up in. It won’t be the *major* selling point, but it’s something I’ll consider – especially as I get less and less trusting of the internet and cell devices in my life becoming increasingly creepy and dangerous. 
How about where I am here in podunk Winsted? Well, the Connecticut Mesh Map says there’s a big repeater just south of town that covers the entire town and a couple miles south on THE OCHO, and nothing else for dozens of miles. If it was actually on and relaying, it would extend the reach of these little handhelds to cover that entire area, but I’ve been checking since I built the radios, and it doesn’t appear to be up anymore, or it’s something that gets turned off and on when the owner needs it running. It’s just been about 9 hours since I started scanning, and there’s nobody else nearby. That will be most people’s experience when they get a radio like this if they aren’t in an area that’s already built out by enthusiasts with fixed repeaters. It’s lonely air out there in the sticks. However, since every radio is also a mini-repeater and new solar repeaters are going up every day, the networks are growing and reaching more areas. I think it’s interesting and worth exploring, and it reminds me a lot of early IRC days on 2400 baud dialup internet. 
The first Sticker Packs have gone out – Time to make some more! :D