MeshEnvy is announcing a partnership with Burning Mesh, the community that has spent years bringing off-grid mesh communications to Black Rock City. They built the playa network that keeps camps, art cars, and adventurers connected when cell service disappears. We just closed the loop back to Reno. That is the hello Reno milestone we set our sights on for the 2026 burn, and Burning Mesh is the partner that makes the playa side of it real.
MeshEnvy is announcing a partnership with the Black Rock Amateur Radio Association (BRARA) in cooperation with the Black Rock Rangers and Ranger Outpost Gerlach (ROG). Together they gave us the final link we needed to carry messages from the playa back to Reno. That is the corridor we have been chasing since our first goal post, and I did not expect to close it on a day I thought was just an information-gathering trip.
McClellan Peak rises in the Virginia Range above the Comstock country, and yesterday Willow and I went up together to get a node on the air at Dave Metts's High Sierra Communications site. We had a Father's Day epic in mind: this install plus two more sites before the sun went down. The peak had other ideas.
Toulon Peak sits in a beautiful range just west of Lovelock and provides coverage for the greater region around there. I set out yesterday morning to install a node at Dave's tower site on the summit. The universe had other plans. I discovered a leak in my rear differential and did not want to make things worse miles from civilization.
Today we planted a node at Desert Peak, a High Sierra Communications site east of Fernley in the Hot Springs Mountains. From the summit you can see for miles in every direction. The Carson Sink and the old lakebed country spread out below in pale, cracked playa that looks like dry salt beds no matter which way you turn. That kind of horizon is exactly why a backbone node here matters. One radio on a peak like this can light up a whole basin that otherwise has almost nothing between it and the sky.
Today we planted a fence node at Patrick Tower, a High Sierra Communications site east of USA Parkway in Storey County. This was an initial site visit: get from zero to one, learn what the location can do, and improve from there. With Dave Metts' generous support, we have another live foothold on the industrial corridor between Reno and the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. That stretch is filling in fast with logistics, manufacturing, and data center construction. A mesh backbone node here extends coverage toward the Truckee Meadows and the I-80 corridor communities that already depend on Patrick Tower for public safety radio.
Virginia Peak now carries a MeshEnvy backbone node at the High Sierra Communications facility on the Pah Rah crest. That single placement matters more than most. From one of the highest summits around Reno, we can start tying the Truckee Meadows to the desert basins, playa country, and ridgelines that surround it.
MeshEnvy is announcing a partnership with High Sierra Communications, a Northern Nevada microwave relay operator Dave Metts founded in 1982. We are starting on their flagship site at Peavine Peak, where Dave's compound sits at the highest point on the mountain with the best line of sight in every direction.
Sierra Electronics has been keeping Northern Nevada connected since 1964. The company was built on public safety and mission-critical radio: hospitals, first responders, schools, and the wide-area systems that let people reach each other when it counts. That community focus is not marketing copy on their website. It is how Jarry Walton and his team have operated for more than sixty years.
When a tower owner with that history offers space on Peavine Peak for a nonprofit mesh repeater, it matters. Sierra Electronics is not just leasing us rack space. They are dedicating real infrastructure, at one of the best vantage points in the Truckee Meadows, to something that serves the public good.
I recently spent some time up on Brock Mountain here in Tonopah, Nevada, for the annual Brock Mountain Users Group Summit. There were about 20 of us in attendance, representing the Department of Energy, the Nevada Department of Transportation, the FAA, and several private infrastructure companies. It was my first time in a room quite like that, and it was incredibly educational.
