Good point. There are also some great protocol optimizations that can made in that case. Someday we should make a “Be a router” checkbox which would tell that node to a) power up the GPS only super rarely, b) tell adjacent nodes to increase the weight for routes to this node (because the user knows this node has good line of sight).
Item B is especially important because it will allow substantial improvements to the efficiency of flood routing (which is how most of our packets are sent). This non-naive version of flooding would dramatically decrease the aggregate airtime used for broadcasts.
Adding an issue linking to this thread: