Yeah, I was misremembering exactly how APRS worked. I had a higher power mobile in my vehicle set up to digipeat packets from my handheld, but I guess that most mobile/handheld APRS radios are not digipeating. I just liked that with APRS the repeating stations name was appended to the packet, and I also liked that you could specify a path if desired.

Sometimes I am using meshtastic with just a couple of nodes in the middle of nowhere, and it currently works great for that. But at my house I've got a rooftop node, and then there is a mountaintop repeater many miles away that the rooftop node can hit, and a static node in FarAwayTown on the other side of the mountain. If I were able to set a path to "hop3" in the first scenario, but change it to "rooftop,mountaintop,FarAwayTown,hop3", it would allow me to communicate to those in FarAwayTown without bogging down the local mesh. I was pretty stoked that I could create solar meshtastic nodes to stick on a rooftop or nearby mountaintop for less than $20 to extend range, but doing so seems to cause a lot of congestion locally.

Then again, it is likely that I have no idea what I am talking about and need to study up on meshtastic 😆 I'm pretty new to this.