[bergie]

We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly.

This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.

We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).

[mtlynch]

Parent wrote a great blog post about this for anyone interested in the details:

https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...

[Levitating]

I just bought three SenseCap T1000-E's for the exact same purpose.

Sadly I sail on the other side of the world so we likely won't be connecting.

[bergie]

We started this trip with a summer cruise in Scotland, so who knows where we'll end up

[bearded_comrade]

I've always thought that meshtastic (or something similar) would be great for cruisers. Have you encountered anyone else using it?

[bergie]

A few boats, yes. But it is still a "new thing". Before leaving Panama I ordered a stack of cheap Heltec V3 Meshtastic boards so we can give some to our buddy boats