Its a LILYGO T3S3 (a module focused on handheld use) stuck into a housing I modeled myself and 3d printed out of ASA plastic. It has some Chinese "high gain" 915MHz antenna inside the grain silo looking part, which is oversize to prevent too much signal reflection/distortion from the plastic being too close to the antenna. Its powered by 18ga alarm system wire that I draped down the roof to a 5v power supply on the deck. And since I'm renting, non permanent modifications only, thus the clamp to the vent pipe.
Its what I had, just to get started. Quickly realized I needed to be on my roof to get any good connections in my node-sparse area haha.
So far it's working well, I have 13 consistent mesh connections with 3 direct connections, when before I would previously only get spotty connections to the mesh at all from inside my house.
I'll buy some better base station hardware later, once I put one up at my girlfriend's house a few miles away....
Just note that many countries and cities are moving away from meshtastic to meshcore (same hardware, better protocol) due to scaling issues inherent in meshtastic
Australia is pretty much entirely meshcore apart from some abandoned derelict meshtastic nodes
I did see meshcore before I got into this stuff, but my issue is meshcore seems less resilient in lower density areas where there may not be many people investing in well positioned base stations. Almost all my typical use cases are very rural, where every possible node contact matters, and I do not have the money or physical access to set up enough of my own good base stations.
Meshcore nodes can all repeat messages now for the very circumstance you describe
This was a recent enhancement
...interesting... well, good thing it all uses the same hardware haha
However, if you are militant about open source, meshtastic is the only way to go, because for about a year, all the mesh core interface apps were closed source proprietary crapware, and some of the firmware for some of the devices is also proprietary.