I’m new to meshtastic too. Just an FYI, you can make the primary channel a custom private one and still have a longfast pubic channel as a secondary as long as you you set the Lora frequency to 20 (at least that’s the default one in the USA).

I coincidentally just got two of them today! I’m getting sub 1km in my neighborhood between my nodes, but the one I suck up in the attic earlier is consistently pinging nodes in cars as they drive on an overpass 6.6 km away! Pretty neat.

Do you have any recommendations for long range nodes, maybe atenna?

Seeed studio has some cool stuff! I’m waiting on 2 sensecap card style nodes from them to test out. If they work well I’m going to buy a handful of these and maybe some dedicated GUI devices. I live in a natural disaster hotspot.