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Smallest that would fit a battery and a Heltec v4.
Live in a fairly small town in the southeast US but the local Amateur Radio club has a Meshtastic radio on a tall building in town and I was immediately able to see ~20 nodes and had 5 people talking in LongFast.
Wish I could have an outdoor pole mounted base station, but living in an apartment makes it hard. It seems to work okay on my 3rd floor windowsill though!
Link to case model: https://www.printables.com/model/1519914-heltec-lora-32-v4v3-pocket-pager-case/files
I did not order a router.
There’sa local group who said just buy a companion device and get into it before buying a router
I think I misinterpeted. I think you're talking about router in a coloquial sense, like a network router. I took it as the Meshtastic ROUTER role (their capitalization, not mine). Routers for Meshtastic don't need to be special devices. It's just a config setting that sets the role of a device. The default role is CLIENT which already routes and therefore extends the mesh. When you set your device role to ROUTER/REPEATER it starts acting in a different manner where the mesh treats it in specially which is only useful if the device is placed very high, e.g. CN Tower, top of a hill, high radio mast, etc. So I'd order whatever device I like and leave its role as CLIENT, unless I have access to a special location. It'll help grow the network.
Here's how the role setting looks on every Meshtastic device:
E: CLIENT_MUTE is useful when you have multiple devices and you don't want them to retransmit between each other, pointlessly eating hops.
Ah, I did not order a repeater