Sioux Empire club opens Meshtastic build-kit group buy for Sioux Falls coverage

The Sioux Empire Amateur Radio Club was turning Meshtastic into a shared build, not a solo experiment, with sign-ups for its build-kit group buy set to close after the Tuesday, June 2 meeting. The point was simple: get more nodes into the Sioux Falls area and make the mesh more useful for everyone who already relies on it or wants to start.

Meshtastic fit that goal because it is built around inexpensive LoRa radios running as an open-source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network. The project says no phone is required for mesh communication and that devices rebroadcast messages to form the network, which is exactly why node density matters. A single handheld can be fun; a cluster of well-placed nodes is what starts to feel like infrastructure.

SEARC offered two kit options. One was a portable node, a self-contained handheld unit meant to be carried anywhere. The other was a solar build, a fixed outdoor node designed to run on solar power. That split matters because Meshtastic networks usually grow in two directions at once: portable units for field use and permanent nodes to fill in coverage gaps around town.

The club also stripped away one of the usual setup hassles. People could sign up by adding their name, callsign if they had one, contact information, and preferred kit to a spreadsheet, and no Google account was required. That kind of low-friction ordering is the difference between curious members dropping off and actually getting hardware on the air.

SEARC’s move also shows how amateur radio clubs can speed up adoption. The club, an ARRL-affiliated group serving Sioux Falls and southeast South Dakota, meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7:30 p.m. at the Minnehaha County Emergency Management Building, 608 Sigler Ave., Sioux Falls. Its 2026 officers are Adam Zimmel, WØZML, as president; Byron Olson, WØWB, as vice president; Will Gravning, KEØZ, as secretary; Christine Bower, NØPEJ, as treasurer; and James Donato, KD2UHP, as net manager.

That local-organizing model lines up with Meshtastic’s own direction. The project’s community pages list local groups that are actively organizing regional networks, and its homepage says the network has 1,800-plus community-supported devices and 39 languages available. Meshtastic also introduced a Site Planner in January 2025, giving builders a way to think harder about terrain and placement instead of guessing where a node might work.

The bigger backdrop is spectrum pressure. In 2024, the FCC sought comment on NextNav’s 902-928 MHz proposal, ARRL warned it could affect amateur uses in that band, and Meshtastic publicly opposed the plan. Against that backdrop, a club-led group buy is more than a shopping list. It is a practical way to build coverage now, while the Sioux Falls mesh is still small enough to shape.