I am getting my gotenna mesh On the 28th of June
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Heck yeah! Welcome to the mesh. 
I use mine for outdoor activities and general hacker-dom, some prepper activity I suppose as well. Others here use it for gliderplanes to SAR (search and rescue), and travel all over the place.
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Without a doubt! Do you have any plans for testing or potential uses? I’m sure we have plenty of other Meshers here who can help you get acquainted!
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Here is a couple idea’s I had for the units:
1- I have two kids and one is in school. He want’s a phone but I feel it will only be used (Usefully) for when he leaves school to come home. The school is a block away and so if I hand him a phone, with no ISP coverage (My old phone.), with a goTenna then he, in theory, can message me or my wife (I work from home and my wife is a stay at home Mom.) that he is out of school and maybe wants a play date with a buddy. I have yet to test this application and see if the range will work. (I have a feeling it will work!)
2- I want to speak with the parents that I know in the area about goTenna. I dream that one day some key homes in the area will have a goTenna acting as a repeater for if/when a outage does occur.
3- We go to Canada’s Wonderland (Yeah I live in Toronto, ON, CANADA) as season pass holders. I have a couple old phones that I can turn on and slip into my kids bags for if we get separated & track where we each are (ie: My wife and son go on a ride while me and my daughter go get a hamburger).
4- We go camping allot as a family in the back-country and this will work great for staying in touch with each other.
Man…it’s endless!
Thanks,
-JH
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All great ideas! Let us know when you chat with other parents. If we can, we’d love to support your efforts to get your neighborhood Meshed.
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Awesome!
I would love to see a product from goTenna that could be mounted on the external surface of a building as a dedicated Mesh Antenna (With easy power cables to keep powered on 24/7). Once I receive my goTenna package I will see if I can build an outdoor box that will be weatherproof while still allowing signal pass through. I want to mount one permanently to my home. 
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JH,
Welcome! I tend to think linking to your son at school will work, it’s well within range. The only fly in the ointment might be how the school is constructed, if it’s concrete with steel reinforcement or stucco/brick over steel mesh this may block the signals from getting through. There are fixes for that, so start simple, see what you get then there is a helpful community here ready to help.
One of the neat things abut your idea of using the goTenna instead of the phone is that a phone can still seemingly stays involved. No one need feel like they’re not keeping up with their peers by all appearances. In fact, classmates may end up envious of the goTenna and decide that it’s a pretty cool idea.
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Great project idea! We have some very talented Meshers who’ve rigged similar setups. You can checkout some past projects here.
You should also chat with @MikeL. He has some very impressive node setups in UMESH.
You beat me to it! Thanks @MikeL!
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Once I cleared up the gibberish. It was trying to finish lunch and write at the same time and hit send a little early…now it’s edited into some semblance of clarity.
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Thanks for the warm welcome!
The idea was for him to step out of school (As they all pour out and then ask for play-dates then.) then message us so I don’t think the building (Yes, it’s like a bunker!) will effect my original idea.
Yeah! you nailed it about the peers (!!) and keeping up. I think when he shows his buddies they might think it’s a cool idea and I can use it to start conversations with parents and such.
I’m really excited and I’m truly pleased at the support from this community!
Thanks MikeL!
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OMG that link is CHOCK full of awesome! I’m geeking out pretty bad over here…
Thanks @anon62894636
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Recess, yes! That was going to be one of my suggestions, getting outside that sort of envelope to make contact is exactly what’s needed. Sounds like you’ll get the hang of this quickly.
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Yeah I really can’t wait to try it. I will create a post and keep on-top of the progress of this school application in a separate thread unless someone has already implemented & posted. (Feel like we hijacked this one a bit…Sorry!)
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That may well be the case. I know when I was in school, Nintendo DS Pictochat was groundbreaking. We could all chat from different places on the bus, ad-hoc. Just the thing when you have a strict bus driver. The Mesh enables similar functionality, but on a much larger scale.
The main problem I’m running into is parents who hand their 6 - 9 year old child a cell phone with full admin privileges & a connection to their local ISP. Kids now are texting using regular cell towers & surfing the web without oversight. Call me paranoid but I’m in the tech field and I’ve seen the stupid that grown adults have done…giving the same horse power to a 6 - 9 year old scares me. My son tells me his friend’s phones are chock full of games and his friend was caught with porn in his surfing history.
It’s an uphill battle but I think goTenna can help!
I know what you mean. I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was 13, and that was only because I started track and needed to coordinate a ride. I got a smartphone at 16 to replace my worn out iPod Touch.
Now I see 5 year olds with iPhones, yet I worry about my 8 year old nephew having a flip phone.
Having a goTenna as the means of communication would certainly be better than regular cell service for kids. Even as an adult, I’d love to be at that point, though for different reasons.
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Yeah, I truly carbon copy your feelings. (& I too had a phone once turned 16! high five!)
My biggest issue when talking to parents is that they justify their giving of a phone to a minor is only for staying in contact > security/safety. I get it, but it’s ironic that they’ve just handed a powerful computer to a child with full root access to the internet & social media: Not a good idea when measured via a risk vs reward analysis.
If all a parent wants is to have the ability to check in on occasion, lock the phone down to its basic function, comms only = goTenna if range permits or cell connection with txt only.
I don’t know…call me paranoid (Yeah…I am…). But I’ll repeat myself in that, in this age of technology, if one doesn’t fully understand the repercussions of a simple action, like posting a PERCEIVED negative tweet, FB or Instagram post or youtube video, & how it can be life-altering, don’t allow the risk.
With that said, I’m staging a Rasberry Pi as my son’s first “computer” to learn with. I said he can own his first PC if he can build/understand it first.
Sorry for the rant. “Be a creater, not a consumer”
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What do you plan to use yours for @P.K.Lovecraft79?
texting friends 