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I misclicked, I was going to write more.

I hardly know what I'm doing, so I would like to know if my idea will work or not before I spend my money and put all this stuff together.

Sounds fine enough, just make sure to read the rnode creation docs and reticulum manual.

Good luck!

Thank you.

Using your dad's WiFi antennas for LoRa devices is not a good idea because they are 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz antenna's. LoRa frequecies are much lower. A mismached antenna wont transmit properly and can potentially damage the transmitter.

I do have the antenna's that came with the LoRa boards so I can use those instead

Thanks for telling me

unsure where you're located (and what frequency you're running LoRa on) but, i've had fantastic results with the GIZONT 915mhz antennas. I have both the 20cm and 40cm and use them often. went from ~1km in a dense urban area to ~3km.

try out the j antenna design, works good for me. also the t2lt coax antenna adapted to the 900mhz is easy to build and performs good. but you need a small antenna analyzer(50-100$) to calibrate it

Here in Europe we use 868 MHz. I experimented meshtastic firmware with tlora and heltec devices; a real simple homemade antenna allows me to link nodes 50km away (in line of sight). You just need some pigtails (SMA for Tlora and Ipex-1 for Heltec) and steel wire or brass sticks to build a JPole antenna.

For your setup, I would suggest using a simple vertical dipole for your home node then a directional antenna on your remote nodes. You probably do not need to get anything too expensive for the vertical dipole, the less coax cable you run the better. Personally I would feed the antenna directly with the node with no coax (they are so small so will not be to hard on the connector. To keep it simple, an omni directional antenna for your homebase then a directional one for all the others, if you have a soldering iron and some wire and a connector you can have your home node up in less than 30 dollars.