Not for any real purpose yet but I think it would be a fun project and could help us get used to using secure communications outside of our phones. Does anyone have experience setting one up? Also there was a guide posted somewhere on Lemmy recently that I am having trouble finding if anyone could share.
https://meshtastic.letstalkthis.com/ is good for setting up handheld devices.
There are also a bunch of diy solar node builds like this https://kaspars.net/blog/solar-lora-meshtastic
here in Denver there are about 25 nodes online at a given time