I started experimenting with meshtastic in December last year, but so far it has been a really quiet network, so I'm not seeing the congestion problems the author highlights. According to meshmap there should be a node ~2 miles from my house but I don't reliably see it. I don't see the next closest at 4.3 miles either. For some reason I saw the next furthest (~8.4 miles) for a few days, but it has since disappeared. Since Christmas I've seen 583 nodes from mine - none reliably.
My node is a solar powered tree hanger hanging maybe 25 ft above the ground, and I'm in southeast michigan with a typical ~30 minute commute into the suburban cities.
I really liked this article but in the end it reinforced my belief in meshtastic - I don't need a computer connected to my node and I'm not paying for any meshcore features. I just wish there were more fixed nodes out there to extend the network.
All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters.
Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience.
Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing.
It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.
For sensor stuff use LoRaWAN + Mirotik Basestation + Chirpstack
Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.
I really like the technology and almost jumped in, but quickly realized the lack of the _network_ effect in a community.
I live in a dense urban area, and yet I see very few nodes nearby, where I image I will be left in starvation. Without a proper mesh, I couldn't send a message to a fried 2 miles away with no los.
Well, here in the Czech Republic we managed to cover all the main urban centers with MeshCore in less than one year:
https://analyzer.meshcore.cz/#/live
I can send a message to a friend in Prague with my MeshCore companion, it goes via the MeshCore repeater I have on my balcony which forwards the message to the local city mesh. Then it goes over various repeaters, usually on hills, to the Prague city mesh & reaches the friends companion. It usually takes about 8 to 10 hops, covering 200-400 km, based on the path taken.