Unlicensed (let's ignore pedantics here unless you are curious) radios have useless range for communications. What a shock. At least meshtastic has a repeater infrastructure in some places. I prefer the tech of reticulum so far but no one to play with and no repeaters.

I've been looking into reticulum but all I have are standard WiFi / Ethernet devices and idk about running custom firmware on a router to act as a hub...

I need to look if it supports my heltec v3 devices yet. I'm not exactly active on meshtastic so no loss to flash them over.

I have stacks of old laptops I could just put Kali or Tails on them strategically hide them around my town