Comment by hxii
4 days ago
It's interesting to see use-cases like this "in the wild" (as opposed to some hobbyist group trying stuff out).
With a little investment, I think Meshtastic/Reticulum could do wonders for communities like this. With Argentina being largely flat, even putting up a relatively short mast on the roof of a house should give it a good enough range (~10-30km).
The article is about conventional broadcast, but if two way is interesting, there’s a great project doing digital over HF in rural areas, particularly South America:
https://www.rhizomatica.org/what-we-do/
Lightweight HF rigs and the Hermes Mercury digital modem:
https://mercury.hermes.radio/
Argentina is almost 3 million km^2 with a population density of less than 20/km^2
California is roughly 1/10th the size & 10x the population density, with what is likely the largest meshtastic network in the world and that isn't able to span more than about 1/5th of the state (without even getting into reliability or lack thereof).
There is already a group of people working on meshtastic: https://mesharg.com.ar/ with an active telegram group.