Generally, due to it’s low power properties, LoRa is not resilient to jamming, though the modulation itself should be quite robust.

If you think about situations as in Iran, where a rogue government would try to interrupt communications, then you don’t need to care about legality. This gives you some options. For example you could run meshes on multiple, normally illegal, frequencies. You could increase tx power, HeltecV4 has an output amplifier and you could build a node with an even bigger output amplifier. You could use high gain directional antennas to avoid noise, which might be not legal normally.

Personally what I would do is build many cheap solar nodes and program them in a way that they come up only for like 10-20mins randomly once per night. I would also scatter them in the area and make it such that every night a different subset of nodes comes online. The timing would be based on some pseudo-randomness where only trusted people know the seed/algo. If you can spend the effort then the node key exchange protocol in meshtastic is not great, maybe a predetermined node list or a manual authorization of keys by some master node could be developed. Also some means to hinder fingerprinting of nodes. This would make it a pain for the police to track and take down all nodes.

To keep costs low I’d use faketec boards with DIY antennas and solar panel, battery and outdoor case from aliexpress. Probably you could do 10$ for a board, 10$ for antenna materials and 10$ for rest, add in an amplifier and you’re maybe looking at 40$ in total. 10 nodes should cover a city with some redundancy and if it’s within some hundred kilometers to the border then you could have nightly cross border communication for less than 1000$ plus some weekend work for setting it all up. And some policeman would have to do nightshifts for weeks at a time to hunt down all the nodes, after which you could start over.

Nope. We are broadcasting below 1 watt.

A noicy air conditioner could, in theory, jam our nodes. Ive seen it with satelite ground stations. Or a big enough tree.

Plrase someone prove me wrong but thats my understanding.