After listening for days and only seeing my node I decided first to try war driving around to see if I could find other local nodes in my area. I drove about 10 miles north, south, east, and west of my home location with no contact at all. It occurred to me that part of the problem may be related to how my node and/or other nodes may be configured. I’m using the Mestastic app on an iPhone. The minimum node info broadcast interval that can be set in the app is one hour. According to the Meshtastic documentation the Node Interval Broadcast Setting “is the number of seconds between Node Info message (containing i.a. long and short name) broadcasts from the device. The device will still respond ad-hoc to NodeInfo messages when a response is wanted. When the device hears any packet from a node it doesn’t know yet, it will send its NodeInfo and ask for a response automatically.” Now it is entirely possible that I was driving by a node that was nearby but that node and/or my node was in-between sending a Node Info message. I could have been out of range by the time either node sent an info broadcast. I’l take a look at the Android app and the Web client to see if it can be set to a lower value.
In the meantime, I decided to setup MQTT and created the mesh/US/DMV subtopic. I posted the subtopic in several groups and this group as well. As it turns out, I’m still not in Lora range of any node. However, I’m not alone in the DMV and it’s great t o be able to communicate to others in the area.