In meshtastic, you can manually set the location with long/lat.
Ive seen it where people dont update that while they go on trips.
Also there is MQTT so if the node can communicate with the internet, its possible.
A community to discuss Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction)
Other mesh communities:
MeshCore: !Meshcore@feddit.org Reticulum: !Reticulum@mander.xyz
In meshtastic, you can manually set the location with long/lat.
Ive seen it where people dont update that while they go on trips.
Also there is MQTT so if the node can communicate with the internet, its possible.
Could be any or all of that, yeah. You can also set the level of precision for your reported location, but I don't think even the lowest precision settings would put it 1,000 miles away.
I live near-ish to an airport, and I'll occasionally see nodes that are 1 or 2 hops and 100-200+ miles away. Best I can tell, the airborne node is legit relaying those which I think is pretty cool. Not really useful, but cool.