In other words, would I simply take the t beam and switch it on, and it’s automatically a repeater node without me having to do anything else to it?
The device doesn’t need to be hooked to a phone to work as a repeater. Though yes, during the initial setup you’d want a phone. Because by default though when you turn on any node it is a repeater, they are all talking on the “Default” channel. You’d probably want to pick your own channel name but that is not required.
“Repeater mode” which mostly means "tweaking power management and routing behavior given that the user is saying “I want this to run a long time without a phone and I think it has pretty good line-of-sight over an area” is a high priority soonish (<1 mo?).
This will be formalized more in this issue: