Nice, enjoy it. If you have any questions let me know. To get the best range make sure to replace the antenna, Here are some recommended by Meshtastic Team. https://adrelien.com/best-antenna-for-meshtastic/

Perfect I got also GIzont they are pretty good, Enjoy meshing

Hmm, yeah. Well for me I am not an expert guy. I am looking to get license free comm device, I see Meshtastic with text comms and PMR with voice.

Hope you liked the information.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but how can you use existing ones without carrying a node?

No idea what eli5 means

https://adrelien.com/what-is-meshtastic-full-guide-on-how-to-get-started/

https://adrelien.com/what-is-meshtastic-full-guide-on-how-to-get-started/ Here, I also gave some usecases

But I mentioned llama, which is self hosted

I mean you kinda of looking at from the wrong way, In the company I work for, it was a time saver. A department of engineers in embedded systems can upload some measurements then another department can quicky run some questions to write the findings for a customer. They both don’t know anything about SQL and ti is even faster than the tool we built for them. Since they have to filter through 1TB of data. Yes it needs a lot of optimization to get it perfect.