Here is my vision.  Don't know if it has been thought of or tried but anyway...

I would like to have the Pi node with the TNC, which I have working, act as an APRS server of sorts.  Then when the mesh is deployed at say a fire the firefighters could be carrying APRS equipped handhelds or mobiles.  A service available on the mesh would allow those in control to see where personnel are located.

Lots of things to do to make it happen and some I don't know how to do. :-)  The idea is to try and  prevent the disaster that happened last year with 16 dead.  I theory it sounds good but implementation is lacking for me.

Anyway, back to dreaming.

Kirk - N6SXR

Simple answer:

Ignore the mesh, it's not relevant to what your planning at first.

Treat this exactly the same way you would for a aprs node that was at someone's house.  Get all that sorted first.

After that than you can look at how to combine the data from each node (the problem here is can you trust all nodes will always have contact. This will be pretty unlikely. You would more likely need a query method from a central node that crawls out and asks the other nodes (or receives pushes and checks for the node not being reachable)

The simple method is configure all field nodes to stream updates to a single central node.  But again that assumes the nodes can reach that node at all times (this is how aprs gateways work currently when they go over the internet) or that they store history for forwarding when they can connect to the central node.

the non central method of this is just to display the aprs position data on each node and that you go to each node and ask it "hey who's here". Some APRS servers may be able to do this already.