Theoretically you can get 50 ish miles or more with line of sight. In practice, you can get around 10 ish with repeaters. With around 30 devices, our city has effective coverage.

You also have options to use MQTT if you want to make sure a message gets through. But that requires an internet connection.

Additionally is there a way to search what's already out there without a device?

Its biggest + in my book is that you don't have to be a ham to make it work. There are better systems if you want more reliable communications. But its a fun side hobby and, in the event of a power outage, a decent little communicator. Although from personal experience, most of the devices piggy back of your existing cell phones and bluetooth. So ironically as long as the cell towers aren't blown to hell, your still fine either way.

I'm running about 1w per device ATM.

So yeah it sips energy. There's a lot of nodes in the mountains that are solar powered. They work.

Very low and yes. They work great for IoT, as long as it’s not mission critical stuff as messages can get dropped or arrive out of order sometimes. But for something like monitoring a remote sensor station that’s within the Lora range, without needing a cellular plan, yes.

Yeah, we had to make a weather app on longfast to fill the void. Tech people tend to not talk all that much. We are the strange ones ;)

Most of the weather app was made from a reddit post back a year or so ago. I have no idea where though. App is a python script here if your interested.

In theory the protocol can support those formats. With meshtastic it's only designed for text. You can get some really basic emojis though since they are Unicode.

The phone app gives the location of nodes want you to know. And most don't care. For example, in my city there is currently 24 online nodes my window node has interacted with. And 174 in total nodes it's contacted today.

It can be spotty during certain times of the day.