

Yea there are some pretty cool ones these days that resemble a blackberry. Checkout the " t-deck plus" by lilygo. The repeater nodes could be cheap solar powered remotes setup at high vantage points, wouldn’t need too many to get city coverage given the line of sight , drone drop’em on a couple of highrise rooftops and off you go. …in theory.
Another rgood app is “andflmsg” for Android. It will.let you use a all the common modulation schemes , to transmit text, it can even send images.