I got stuck on an idea a little while back: tornado sirens for wildfire evacuation warnings. But with a mesh. I spun up a new project to capture my thoughts here.

I descended into Meshtastic and MeshCore land. Cool stuff. I have a few ESP32 LoRa boards on hand, so I flashed them to experiment. I wish I didn't live in a hole in the ground - it's not great for 900MHz propagation.

Other findings:

• Meshtastic looks fun, MeshCore looks like it will scale better for a city-scale project.
• Reno has at least two community meshes already in place: Mesh Envy and NV Mesh (also nevadamesh.com).
• If I'm going to participate in a LoRa mesh from the home QTH, I'm gonna need a bigger boat, er, antenna? PA? Also, I need (yes, need, not want) to build and deploy a few DIY solar powered MeshCore repeaters around town to fill some of the coverage gaps.
• LiPo won't work well here in winter, or summer. LiFePO4 will be better.

72s, friends. Stay safe.