…probably dig into Reticulum, Sideband and maybe even The Nomad Network. It’s a very intriguing rabbit hole.
Hey, Another Bear in Mah Trash! Who keeps throwing out these perfectly good bears?
So I had my first conversation with a stranger on the Meshtastic radio! I had gotten tired of not being close enough to any other nodes to get a viable connection with anyone, so I set up MQTT on the radio and suddenly, all of Connecticut is my oyster! Last night I tagged a node in Northfield, many, many miles away. We chatted a bit on the ConnNet channel, and I checked him out on the map and saw he had been connecting to nodes as far away as Manhattan, so this thing seems to be working.
Now I can send/recieve text messages sent via mesh internet relays! This basically allows me to text to any other node that is connected with MQTT, and they can text back, anywhere there’s internet. Essentially it bootstraps the “worldwide” part of the mesh networking over intertubes unless/until the connection can be made over the LoRa band. This means I can set up a TWDB Private Channel for people worldwide to chat in, with all chats fully encrypted end to end, with eventual future-proof-ability when the Mesh network starts reaching critical mass. 
So I did: Private Channel: TWDB, Public Encryption Key: TEKCW6xxjSnf/5uKkKfDNyBjg6Vv283w7skAJ/8QQAI=
Fire up your Meshtastic radio, set up MQTT on it for the default meshtastic MQTT relay server and add my new channel – then come in and chat! :D
I got to start unpacking boxes or just get a radio, but…Field Day is approaching and I need some things for that event. Ah, Mrs. M. I can kind of show her what I am looking at on Amazon and get a cheap Mesh radio for my Birthday.
Heh, been dead so far. Kind of tempted to try out Meshcore despite the drama. I’d go straight to Reticulum except there’s no iOS app for Girl 1, but I’m very intrigued by the network structure itself and the extra file/image/audio transfer functionality. In any case, I was kind of expecting Meshtastic to be more like CB Radio in the public channels, but I’ve been live for weeks and only managed to stir up the one dude on the state channel. He says everyone’s on 2M, so I guess it’s all Hams who keep the mesh up but never chat on it.