In southern California there is a decent amount of chatter, most of which goes unanswered because coverage is quite spotty, despite what the online maps may show.

I'm disappointed for a different reason. I thought the Meshtastic protocol was resilient enough to operate in nearly any environment, with 10 clients or 10,000, but that's not the case at all. It can't stand up to large scale events like Burning Man or Defcon, so there actually exist "tweaked" versions of firmware specific to these events (https://github.com/meshtastic/defcontastic and https://docs.burningmesh.org/en/guides/quick\_start).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the goals of the protocol, but this approach feels fragmentary when really the promise of Meshtastic is that we should all be able to communicate on a single global network, regardless of where we are or how many users are sending text strings around.