State of your goTenna Mesh

I’ve had my goTenna V1’s and Mesh for a while now. And I still use the Mesh for work in off-grid locations. I’ve made a few stationary relays with basic Goal Zero solar panels to breadcrumb the messages if we’re really deep in the woods.

With a lot of other ‘mesh’ devices out there, like the open-source Meshtastic, Beartooth and Radacat, etc. Are you guys still using your goTenna’s or are they just in a drawer somewhere - or have you moved on to other mesh systems.

I’d like to hear from you guys on how you are using goTenna.

Perhaps goTenna and the mentioned Meshtastic, Beartooth and Radacat all use different protocols and thus are not compatible with one another. This is annoying, because the marketing competition is eating away users from any of these, whereas the whole Internet luckily was able to be created working globally. Even between the Metric and Imperial countries, countries waging war against one another, or ideologically or geographically far from another. This all is nullified by companies wanting to tie their customers with their (and just their) products for money and resulting in piling heap of contraptions. You see what I mean. We also have gazillion different incompatible music formats to compete while I see the contents more meaningful than its package.

Personally, my 4 are dormant.

Previously I had one set up at the office (multistory building, window view, but heat shielded windows), but with shelter in place and building shutdowns, it’s come home with me, and I lost my window access in the interim.

Another side effect of all the closures is just a lack of travel, and no off grid time, so no major reason to have them out since we aren’t going anywhere. Been meaning to set up the extra as a relay at home, but haven’t gotten to it (long list of other things

My 4 units have been dormant. I had some spare time on my hands and so I started playing around with one of them. I discovered a firmware update which went nicely. Now, it’s just sitting on the coffee table charging up and not doing anything even though I did send a “shout”. No one’s listening—which is a bummer about trying to use these devices. So, I’ll update the firmware on the 4 units and they’ll probably get “shelved” after that…again.