Meshtastic

Want to set up a powerful

The solar node won't be more powerful in the "radiated transmission" sense, but will have greater reach because it's outside. And height is might as meshfolk say.

solar rooftop node/repeater/router

As others have correctly advised, nrf52-based nodes are power-sippers. This makes them a good fit for solar nodes.

I see some folks on eBay selling $200 home built solar stations. Could anyone recommend any good options for this kind of thing?

I bought one of these from PeakMesh, an etsy/ebay seller. <$100 . Very happy with design, build, performance, and the entire buying experience. I usually prefer to DIY everything but this node checked all my boxes at a sane price.

I've run it as a Meshtastic client base and now as Meshcore repeater after bigger dogs on my local mesh went that direction.

trigger warning - the remainder of the post contains references to reddit which may cause apoplexy in some viewers. :-)

The seller is active on reddit as M-growingdesign. He made a post about this particular design in /r/meshtastic. It was basically marketing but there's a good bit of discussion in the thread, including how he made design decisions.

I just want to buy something and screw it up

I see we are brothers from different mothers :-P