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
No. You do need to check a box in the settings usually that marks your packets as “Okay to MQTT” basically saying you’re cool with things getting forwarded to the Internet. Of course theoretically a bad actor could ignore this.
If you have location on, you’ll still appear on maps to other nearby users. (But not on these online maps)
You can disable sending your location, or you can send a less precise location. (You can configure a radius and it randomly puts you within that radius). And actually one of the online maps I’ve seen says that they will not include you if your location is TOO precise.
But it’s also important to remember you’re throwing radio signals out, you can be tracked by that if someone is determined.
Of course. I was thinking more about a situation where it can be inferred based on things someone has said online about their use of this kind of device and has said about their general location that a particular node is at their home and that is their address (or one of only a few possibilities). Sounds like it’s got that taken care of.
Someone really dedicated to finding you could theoretically analyze a series of random points over time and extrapolate the radius and center of the circle, effectively locating your radio
It honestly wouldn’t be that complicated after collecting enough random points