I started playing around with Meshtastic a few months ago. From a radio and antenna perspective it was certainty very interesting. I even have two ‘nodes’ on air with yagi aerials up in the loft to (hopefully) assist the reach of the network here in the North West of England. I really like the concept of an ‘off grid’ network that could be used in the event of any major failure of the commercial networks.
All that said, I’m now at the point of turning it all off. Why? While I love the technology, the premise that it exists as a communication network appears to me to be fundamentally flawed. The algorithm works in such a way that with the amount of people using it now, the network becomes flooded with data to the point that nothing can get through. Here in the UK, we’re restricted to a 10% transmit duty cycle (at least on the 868MHz band) which also doesn’t help.
I suspect it’s time to start looking into other systems to experiment with!