Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known.

In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.

I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days