hello from Seeed Studio, China

Hi Tanakakari ! Welcome to the Community.

I still have a couple of Beagle bone blacks and a DSO Quad that I bought from Seeedstudio a decade ago. In fact I'm very sure that the RPi that I have in my home network serving as a local FTP and GIT server is also a Pi that I bought from the store. It was one of the first online stores I knew of, that had quality products and affordable shipping to my country.

That is a very fair point. If cellular coverage is already reliable, receiving a message from a stranger through a mesh network may not feel particularly useful. The contrast you described, 38 nodes in one industrial park and almost nothing around it, also captures one of the biggest challenges of a community mesh.

To me, the broader value of mesh is not that every node must have an exciting personal use case. It is that individual nodes can collectively create coverage, redundancy, and a communication network that is not entirely dependent on existing infrastructure. That becomes more meaningful in rural areas, on hiking routes, during emergencies or large events, and for remote sensor networks. Your rocket fuel facility example is a particularly good one because the purpose, participants, and value of the network are all clearly defined.

Thank you, kimikemoo! I actually became a fan of Andreas Spiess during uni. Whether he was demonstrating some simple oscilloscope debugging or explaining radio technologies, I always learned something useful from his videos. But it seems that he has not posted anything new for quite a while.

I think the value of a mesh node becomes much clearer when you are off-grid or outside cellular coverage. Still, even if you rarely check your node, opening it one day and seeing the messages it has picked up over time could be quite interesting!

Thank you, DAB, or should I say Jedi Minion? may the Force be with my first few posts!

Welcome to element14, I look forward to your participation.

 Tanakakari  Welcome to the element14 Community.  I recommend using the Search bar at the top of the page to find more information.  There is a lot on LoRa.
Also look up Andreas Spiess on YouTube.

I don't think there is much on Meshtastic, but I could be wrong.  I am running a node but I rarely look at it.

Theres a lot of good groups on social media, and discord. 
I'm out here in rural USA, and theres hot spots, like 38 nodes in one industrial park, and nothing all around. 
I've tinkered with the mesh networks, but never had a reason to do an ongoing study with them. 
I could get a text message from a stranger. ooh! I could do that with my phone, and the cellular coverage is better. 
before I got my current job I was on-boarding at a rocket fuel production facility, were they were really interested to 
build a mesh network indoors, to monitor all the sensors from a common location. That application makes sense to me. 
every hobbyist I know basically takes their radios for hikes, then tells me they got a ping from Canada, several hundred miles away, from on top of some mountain.
IDK, I'm just not excited by hosting unknown traffic, even it the whole area benefits from better coverage. 

I think I'd be more excited if the application were a bit more clear to me.  

Welcome Akari.  I've bought a couple of modules made by Seeed in the past... and if I remember correctly, they were very affordable.