Want to set up a powerful

The solar node won’t be more powerful in the “radiated transmission” sense, but will have greater reach because it’s outside. And height is might as meshfolk say.

solar rooftop node/repeater/router

As others have correctly advised, nrf52-based nodes are power-sippers. This makes them a good fit for solar nodes.

I see some folks on eBay selling $200 home built solar stations. Could anyone recommend any good options for this kind of thing?

I bought one of these from PeakMesh, an etsy/ebay seller. <$100 . Very happy with design, build, performance, and the entire buying experience. I usually prefer to DIY everything but this node checked all my boxes at a sane price.

I’ve run it as a Meshtastic client base and now as Meshcore repeater after bigger dogs on my local mesh went that direction.

trigger warning - the remainder of the post contains references to reddit which may cause apoplexy in some viewers. :-)

The seller is active on reddit as M-growingdesign. He made a post about this particular design in /r/meshtastic. It was basically marketing but there’s a good bit of discussion in the thread, including how he made design decisions.

I just want to buy something and screw it up

I see we are brothers from different mothers :-P

Im not an expert by any means, but you can get setup with a rooftop node pretty cheaply. You’ll want a NRF-based device for power efficiency so like a RAK WisBlock 4631, then a decent antenna, Rokland has some good options for higher gain fiberglass but your local mesh or HAM club can probably help here since there is a lot of garbage antennas out there. You will probably want an MPPT charge controller as well since the on board one is pretty crap, our local mesh often recommends an option from Aliexpress that’s less than $5. You can build your own node for less than $200 though for sure. If you want a ready to go option, I’ve heard good things about the SeeedStudio SenseCAP P1 and it’s less than $100.

All that said, be sure to coordinate the role with your local mesh. A poorly placed router can cause a ton of problems. Almost all rooftop nodes should be client or client_base.