Helium hotspot as base station

Development Hardware
1

Helium hotspots are going for about $150 or less used. A locked device could probably be had for a lot less. Has anyone considered repurposing one of these as a meshtasic base station or repeater station? 8 channel, 27dbm TX power… Really the only problem is high power consumption for a remote application (~3 watts) but this could probably be lower with network functions disabled.

To be clear, I don’t have the skills required to reprogram one of these. :joy: Was just curious if anyone else is exploring this?

2

Entirely dependent on the specific hardware being used, I know one I looked at is a raspberry pi with a concentrator lora module, so that is not very useful for meshtastic.