Meshtastic

It's theoretically possible under ideal conditions but probably not practical.

There is a maximum hop count of 7 which means there can be, at absolute maximum, seven nodes between the sender and recipient. The default, though, is 3 hops.

While the radios may, in theory, be able to work at the range of "a few states over" as the crow flies, terrain, structures, and line of sight would likely prohibit them from working in practice at such distances. You'd also need a reliable series of hops to reach from you to them. Again, at those distances, you'd very likely exceed the maximum hop count pretty quickly.

From what I've seen, large meshes are generally regional.

There's a way to join meshes over the internet via MQTT but I haven't messed with setting that up and in some cases it can potentially overwhelm a local mesh.

Meshcore in Australia is taking off and recently made the first Victoria - Tasmania link. Long distance comms are viable within state with many hops - if you are within range of a repeater hooked into the existing network is possible to go hundreds of kilometres quite easily. We have people participating in synchronous conversations that are occurring over a dozen hops from regional to inner urban anew back again. Yes messages do sometimes get lost but people are creating tools to troubleshoot and track. It's genuinely doing what I had originally hoped Meshtastic would, but could never get messages far enough due to hop limits and telemetry cruft.

Hello, sorry for the random question, but I'm new and still trying to understand the benefits of joining the network and how it works

What is the point of a network that:

• Is off-the-grid but can't connect nodes that are too far away
• Is independent, but forces people to use LoRa which creates a dependence on LoRa-licensed radios
• Is decentralized, but obviously needs few centralized higher power backbone nodes in order to function (e.g. in this case)
• Is peer-to-peer, but from what I read it's recommended to not have your node accessible at all times (or have it read-only?) in order to not have the TTL expire
• Cannot connect remote networks together, but also can't bridge them in some other way

Is the main use case just connecting e.g. a couple of sensors on a remote farm a few kilometers away from your house, and have 2 neighbours relaying the messages to you along the way? 🤔 Why does that need a decentralized peer-to-peer network if it can just be done by simple repeaters?

Ive seen some people theoretically do it with meshcore with a lot of repeaters, but the amount of hops was crazy. Its just not practical unless you get into ham or something.

As the previous responder said, the mesh itself is unlikely to reach that far. MQTT can bridge larger gaps like that, but it depends on the internet. At that point, it probably makes more sense to just use conventional internet methods to communicate.