Writing

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.

We just received a very official letter from the Nevada Department of Taxation, and it is a big deal for the physical expansion of our network.

Under Nevada Revised Statute 372.3261 and Nevada Administrative Code 372.700, MeshEnvy NCC has been officially granted sales and use tax exempt status as a charitable organization. This exemption is valid through June 3, 2031, and it changes the math for our deployments in a major way.

Tim and I hiked Flowery Peak on May 22 to stake a repeater on the crest above Virginia City. The node is on the air now. It fills in the east side of town and works alongside our repeaters on Davidson Peak and Ophir Hill to give the Comstock corridor close to full mesh coverage.

At MeshEnvy, we believe that the vast distances of Nevada should not be a barrier to communication. Today, we are announcing our most ambitious project yet. We call it the Silver Triangle. This is a strategic mission to invite and inspire Nevadans from every corner of the state to help us assemble three critical backbones of mesh radio connectivity—an independent layer that complements cellular and tower infrastructure and adds redundancy for public safety.

At MeshEnvy, our mission has always been clear. We want to ensure that anyone, anywhere in Nevada, can stay connected. While the LoRa (Long Range) hardware standards provide a powerful foundation for this vision, the software protocols that drive that hardware are just as critical. After extensive testing and real-world experience, we are officially migrating our primary deployment strategy from Meshtastic to MeshCore.

On the same day Tim and I hit Ophir Hill, we also placed a node on Davidson Peak. The summit sits on the Virginia Range crest above historic Virginia City at about 7,850 feet. From up there you look down into the Comstock bowl and out across Washoe Valley. We drove Tim's side-by-side carefully over the trail, did range checking, and found a spot that could actually serve the town below.

There is a specific kind of awe that hits you when you reach the top of Ophir Hill. The summit sits in the Virginia Range above historic Virginia City in Storey County, at about 7,782 feet above sea level. From there the whole basin feels within reach, ridgelines in every direction and the Comstock country laid out below.

Spanish Benchmark is a Washoe County high point northeast of Reno, near Spanish Springs. The summit sits at about 6,165 feet above sea level with roughly a thousand feet of prominence, which makes it a strong perch for looking out over the Spanish Springs Valley and the Truckee Meadows rim. We highlighted this location when we announced we were working with the BLM Carson Field Office; here is a short field diary from early visits to the site.

If you hang around the off-grid tech space long enough, the words start to bleed together. Mesh, LoRa, Off-Grid, Decentralized. We use them like they're synonyms, but if we're being honest with ourselves, they aren't.

Lately, I've been thinking about what we're actually trying to build here. Is it just a hobbyist version of the cellular network, or is it something fundamentally different?