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Cross State Communication
(piefed.social)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Meshtastic
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It's theoretically possible under ideal conditions but probably not practical.
There is a maximum hop count of 7 which means there can be, at absolute maximum, seven nodes between the sender and recipient. The default, though, is 3 hops.
While the radios may, in theory, be able to work at the range of "a few states over" as the crow flies, terrain, structures, and line of sight would likely prohibit them from working in practice at such distances. You'd also need a reliable series of hops to reach from you to them. Again, at those distances, you'd very likely exceed the maximum hop count pretty quickly.
From what I've seen, large meshes are generally regional.
There's a way to join meshes over the internet via MQTT but I haven't messed with setting that up and in some cases it can potentially overwhelm a local mesh.
Thanks. What I thought after reading the docs a bit. I'll look at some more options. I'm looking for a solution that doesn't rely on internet or other infrastructure likely to be targeted in an attack. Likely what I'm looking for does not exist or is not built out near me.
You could try something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZxR-qtGH7c
That was fascinating. Thanks! Ive been thinking of getting my ham license. Might push me to get one.
HAM radio is about it for long comms that aren't dependent on other systems.
Even then it takes technical skill on both ends to make that work.
Theres also Meshcore. Same devices, smaller user group, but hasany more hops. In theory messages can go further but its.so less adhoc.
Because of a recent update, favorited router nodes can act as a single hop, which would theoretically increase the amount of nodes that could be traversed before that 7-hop count was reached, but this still probably wouldn't work out for OP.