Of course, you want to know how far your signal is going in every direction. If you’re lucky, you have Kevin to test with who repeatedly types the word The into his app without letting you know if he’s actually seeing your messages. I am assuming that The is his auto-correct changing Test to The.
But if you actually want scientific data, you might want to look into the Range Testing feature (found in Module config). Assuming you’ve got two stable units, one goes mobile with you and one stays at a specific base. You set up both units for Range Test — the sender node and the receiver node. Set your stay-at-home node as the sender and your mobile node as the receiver, then drive around your area. You should be able to save results to a .csv file and the docs describe how to integrate that into mapping applications to visualize your received packets with their locations.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/module/range-test/
I hope to run a test this weekend. We’d love to hear about your results. Ideally, if you have multiple antennas and/or placement locations, this will give you real-world data, although time-consuming to generate, on how your signal makes it out into the world.