I’m new to Meshtastic and this forum but I thought I’d post the story about my first use of Meshtastic, because I find it rather funny. I hope that is ok with everyone.
A friend and I are currently starting a tech nerd meetup in our small town here in Bavaria. It’s not too easy to find the right folks (FOSS, Linux, makers, tech, etc.), especially out in the countryside. So we’ve been meeting for a year now and slowly new folks are showing up.
One of the things my friend and I did was buy two Heltec v3s to test LoRa and Meshtastic in particular. So at the meeting yesterday we brought the devices to our meetup place (a co-working space) to test them for the first time.
We had flashed them at home but none of us had any other users nearby - which we expected, of course. So at some point during our meeting we turned on both devices, I checked the device list and said “hey I can see your device but, oh, there’s another one?!”… So off to the primary channel and “Hello?”. Sure enough someone answered!
We wrote back and forth and told him to join us in the place we met, which he did a few minutes later. Sure enough he was a perfect fit for the group and told us that he had just gotten his device to test, flashed it, set it on the table and sat there doing other things when it suddenly made a noise and told him about a new message.
In the whole town of 12.000 people there are now 3 Meshtastic devices. What are the chances?