For instance, sprinkling a bunch of nodes + sensors in hostile territory should allow for gathering intelligence, guiding drones, setting of fuses...
With the obvious solution of putting mesh nodes on the drones, foregoing the scattering part.
For everyone else, IoT is already there. And good old paying people to do things (the supply of dumb people never gets depleted).
Go somewhere properly remote such as the high north. There is no cell network outside of town. And the satellite coverage is spotty at best. Say you need to go look for someone. Meshtastic relays can be up and working in minutes. A chain of rescuers can spread out along a path, and remain talking to each other, as fast as they can move. Sure, radios can do this too, but long range voice radio require serious power and are still largely line-of-sight. Radio relays are an entirely other expensive thing.
Think also of remote camps (logging/planting/fishing/climbing etc). Toss a lora relay on every vehicle and every work party can talk via the app installed on their normal phones. Use GPS-enabled devices and you can passively keep track of every vehicle. Need to operate two valleys over? As the first crew deploys out they can plop down relays at key points. Years ago I setup something like this using wifi relays. It was hell. It never worked right. The range and lower power demands of lora would have been infinitely easier.
Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.
I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.
With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.
If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.
Something that can also use devices we already have seems like a better solution. I'm surprised BitChat has not seen more popularity. Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
Also arent LoRA systems mostly still line of sight?
Never had a peep from it. 0 connected peers, always -- in every environment.
This leads me to believe that it either does not work, or that I am the only one using it (in which case it also does not work).
They already have it because they ready HN! Only somewhat fascitious... A few motivated individuals can provide connectivity to thousands. There's probably a few such folks in your city already!
> Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
This is exactly how these systems tend to work in practice. Just connect your phone via Bluetooth then use the Meshtastic app. The app can function on it's own to send messages to other phones without cell service, you just won't get the range.