T-echo is pretty good but it drains battery even when "off", so I don't consider it a good option for long-term use. I've had a solar-powered RAK4631 in my window for about a year now, continuous uptime. Pretty cool tech for sure.

IIRC (and I might be mis-remembering this) Meshtastic forwards packets even if it can't decrypt them (as long as it's on the same channel), so anyone could contribute to the coverage by putting a node up at a high elevation. Once someone did this in my area it was amazing how many nodes I could contact.

433mhz has restrictions in the UK, so 868mhz is the alternative...but a esp32 that support that is quadruple the price of 2.4ghz and has an unwieldy antenna

pretty impressive

Instead of using the Python interface directly, I used MQTT as the gateway.

I disliked all the existing MQTT servers (who writes network-facing software in C++!?!?), so I adapted the Mochi server a bit to add support for automatic Let's Encrypt certs: https://github.com/Cyberax/lenc-mochi

One problem is that LoRa is low-bandwidth, so I had to pick and choose what I transmit. I ended up defining a schema that bit-packs all the important (for me) sensor state in just 32 bytes.

As another thought experiment, I'm going to connect it to a pair of InReach satellite transceivers over Bluetooth :)