Anyone running Meshtastic on their boat? Looking for real-world experience

Hi all,
I'm working on an open-source marine safety project — a short-range collision avoidance system built around a Raspberry Pi that fuses several sensor layers: WiFi-based proximity sensing, camera, AIS, and LoRa mesh radio. The goal is to detect the hazards conventional instruments miss — kayaks, paddleboards, deadheads, persons in water — things with no radar return and no AIS transponder.
For the mesh radio layer I'm planning to use a Heltec V3 node running Meshtastic firmware (915 MHz for Canada). The idea is cooperative hazard sharing: if your boat detects something at close range, it broadcasts an anonymised alert over the LoRa mesh so other equipped boats in the area can see it on their chart plotters, even before they're close enough to detect it themselves.
Before I build further I'd love to hear from anyone already running Meshtastic on their boat. Specifically:

1. Real-world range — what are you actually getting? I understand line-of-sight is everything on the water. Are you seeing the often-quoted 5–10 km in practice, or is it more like 1–2 km between vessels at low freeboard? Does antenna height make a meaningful difference at mast vs. deck level?

2. Reliability in a marine environment Salt air, vibration, water ingress — what hardware have you found holds up? Any recommendations on weatherproofing nodes for a permanent install?

3. Integration with chart plotters and navigation software Has anyone got Meshtastic vessels showing up in their chart plotter as trackable contacts? I'm particularly interested in the signalk-meshtastic plugin path — does it work reliably in practice, or are there gotchas?

4. The update rate problem One thing I'm designing around is that LoRa mesh position updates are slow (~60 seconds between fixes). I'm treating LoRa contacts as long-range awareness only — not suitable for CPA/TCPA calculation. Is that how others are using it, or have you found ways to push faster updates?

5. Mixed fleets — non-Meshtastic boats For the cooperative picture to work, other boats need nodes too. How have you found adoption among other cruisers? Is there a critical mass in any cruising areas yet?

Not looking to replace VHF or AIS — this is purely a supplementary layer for the hazards neither covers. Curious what the practical experience looks like before I commit to the hardware spec.

 

First time I heard of it, so not a user, but offshore hazards are a real concern.

My only comment as a mariner is so many hazards are dynamic and so often vessels far apart that sharing dynamic hazards is very different than sharing fixed hazards. The location of a moving kayak 40 seconds ago can change from the edge of the riverbank to the middle of the channel.

I would be very careful in dev to try and differentiate the two; otherwise you are sharing errant data and that could become causal; especially at the aforementioned update rate. A target known to be moving should be identified differently, imo.

Not only changing, but perhaps the kayak on the riverbank was leaving. Now you are showing a hazard no longer there that was in a different location before; so technically there is no hazard at all, but will the system show one? This is a lot like driving on the interstate and the annoying ‘parked car’ still there question that pops on your screen. As a boat captain, I don’t want to have to tell the system, nope, the kayak is gone.

Anyhow, hope I’ve at least offered some humor. Good luck.