Preppers use it as a backup communication channel.

The scenarios are:

  1. Your country is invaded, and you are building a resistance.
  2. Your government becomes a dictatorship. You want to fight back.
  3. Natural disasters: the grid and mobile network are down. You want to organize and work together to help each other.

Meshtastic nicely blends into the existing IoT LoRa traffic. And give you some sort of invisibility.

Other scenarios are similar to ham radio - asking other dudes about the weather.

Or you are out in the mountains with spotty cell coverage and want to be able to send messages to other friends around you

Not everything prepper-like is for prepper-only usage

It's been a while but I can remember going to sport events where the local cell network could not cope with the traffic. Calls wouldn't connect and SMS were delayed.

These would also be handy in construction when you're deep in the bowels of a new building and can't get any reception whatsoever (cell, CB, etc.)

These are the scenarios I was looking for. Thank you.

The extreme event scenarios have pretty obvious applications but are also very rare.

Yes. We use it to have a backup communication channel when all other networks are down. This is an extremely unlikely scenario. If that happens wireless communication is going to be the least of the problems.

Another Carringron scale event is not only likely, it’s virtually inevitable. Whether it happens in our lifetime remains to be seen, but it would fry much of our communication infrastructure. The status quo is much more fragile than it appears.

We have similar plans.

I just bought two LilyGo TTGO T-Echo devices. My plan is to experiment with them on snowmobiles. The ability to be slightly separated (a few km) but still send location and brief messages will be handy deep in the woods where cell coverage is very spotty.