LoRA/Alternative Communication Experiments

General
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A series of events lead me to realise the internet as we know it is extremely easy to kill. In India especially the government isn’t afraid to shutdown the internet. A group here created https://internetshutdowns.in/ to track shutdowns in India.

This along with some other recent happenings led me to wanting to have a “uncensorable” for of communication. This led me to learning about 3 projects.

  1. Meshtastic

  2. OpenManet

  3. Reticulum/Nomad Network

Each of these projects has some pros and cons. I want to document these. As well as document my experiments with each of these and hopefully help some folks make some informed decisions about picking these networks.

Meshtastic

Meshtastic is often the first name you hear when you talk about LoRA mesh networks. It can be connected through a bunch of different hardware. I personally am picking up a lillygo T-beam supreme.

Pros

When meshtastic works well it works really well. A good example of a community coming together is the twin cities(Saint Paul and Minneapolis). You can view their heat map for an idea of their coverage

Mesthastic Coverage Map - MSPMesh - Twin Cities, Greater MN, Western WI Mesh Networking Group . In terms of hardware you can get involved with a relatively low cost hardware investment. If you need an a multi purpose device heltech sells the meshpocket a battery pack that doubles as a battery pack.

Cons

Like almost every project there are compromises. By default all packets on meshtastic are not encrypted. You can quite literally snoop on all traffic flowing through a section of the network if you setup a gateway or a repeater.

This is a limitation of all Lora but for long distances you need line of sight I.e a unblocked view of your the node your trying to contact unless you have repeater to repeat your data along to your destination.

OpenManet

OpenManet is actually a pretty interesting project it uses relatively “new” technology in the form of 802.11ah (WiFi LoRA aka WiFi Halow aka holy shit my neighbor has a kilometer wide WiFi network). It uses Batman-adv(B.A.T.M.A.N Advanced) a layer 2 network routing protocol to effectively create a mesh network between a centeral gateway node and multiple roaming nodes to give you massive coverage for regular internet.

This poses a interesting solution to network blackouts in disaster situation with the gateway connecting via satellite internet. However this has the major limitation WiFi LoRA really depends on not having large obstructions, and has a much shortee range compared to regular LoRA in practice its about ~1km.

Pros

It’s regular internet pretty much all existing applications will work. You can use it for IoT applications and this in fact where WiFi LoRA is used most often.

Cons

Firstly it’s expensive. You need way more hardware some of which is really hard to get right now. The rampocalypse was not kind to the costs of getting started.

Due to its short range, it can be problematic to cover a large region and latency can be quite high. Also its strength is much lower then Lora.

Reticulum

This is honestly the most interesting out of all. The reticulum network/nomad network is built to be agnostic of the underlying protocol. In theory on one end you could have someone using morse code and on the other end a 10 gig fiber uplink.

Pros

Reticulum is built with privacy first. Everything is built on cryptography. All packets are encrypted and there’s no way for nodes in between in the route to determine the identity of the recipient and the sender.

Due to reticulum’s network agnostic nature it is effectively impossible to block. In the worst case one could print out qr codes on paper and then send them via carrier pigeon thus making RFC 1149 real. Jokes aside this is incredibly powerful for a network as we are not dependent on ISPs to transmit data. This also means one can connect to reticulum via the regular internet there’s no need to have extra hardware for it however one can make an rnode for LoRA.

Cons

Due to a series of unfortunate incidents and harassment. Nomad net and reticulum are now developed behind closed doors and a public mirror exists that’s updated when a release happens. It is technically open source however in spirit it is not.

Reticulum isn’t as well known as meshtastic hence fewer people are on the network. And due to its nature social discovery is harder.

I will be posting more as I receive hardware to experiment with. Overall I’m most interested in reticulum. However I’m also excited to play around with meshtastic and possibly get more folks in my city to get into it

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I’m glad you made this post because I briefly looked into LoRA as well, specifically meshtastic. I saw the coverage in my area is pretty decent as far as most cities go. Curious to see how your investigation progresses

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This also reminds me of Yggdrasil, a way to do decentralized routing, though it’s still in alpha I believe.

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Yggdrasil seems very interesting, didn’t know it existed will check out especially since they apperntly have a few reticulum nodes.

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The T-Beam was delivered today. These are a some pictures of what was in the box. It was preloaded with meshtastic which was surprisning as usually its preloaded with SoftRF. However the version is out of date so I’ll be flashing the latest version.

IMG_20260414_091836949
IMG_20260414_0918369494080×3072 2.23 MB

IMG_20260414_091810047
IMG_20260414_0918100473072×4080 2.29 MB

IMG_20260414_091752991
IMG_20260414_0917529913072×4080 1.81 MB

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Wow very solid packing. Might be cool to add some water resistance with an o-ring. Then you have a sweet emergency communication device

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You could 3d print a case for it, I’m going to be 3d printing alley cat’s case for it but I’m sure someone has made a more “rugged” water proof case

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So some updates. Unfortunately not many people in my city have got meshtastic nodes so I’ve been barely able to get a connection with anyone else. I plan to meet up with some tech folks to look into the logistics of rolling out a meshtastic network. However, I did learn some interesting things.

Legality

So I discovered that normally most LoRa uses 915MHz band. In most countries 915Mhz is a completely unlicensed and legal band to use. However In India the 900MHz band is used for telecom(I have no idea what they use it for, just that telco’s own the license and won’t give it up). The 865MHz has thankfully been delicensed for “shot range” devices.

I will need to look into what this entails, we may need way way more devices then I originally thought to create a mesh network.

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I’ve discovered another alternative LoRA network Meshcore. Meshcore is closest to meshtastic, but it has some differences. Be warned there are currently 2 projects calling themselves meshcore. They were the same project but a developer Andy Kirby essentially hide their use of Slop coding, pushed a bunch of code, and attempted to apply for a trademark for meshcore without the knowledge of the rest of the developers. This has led to a split and a fork without the ai code. You can read more about it here

Meshcore

Meshcore at a glance is similar to meshtastic, it uses LoRA to communicate between nodes in a network. However at a fundamental level Meshcore does things differently. On Meshtastic all nodes act equally, there isn’t a prioritization of certain types of nodes for hops. In essences it is a flood of messages. Each node also tracks every node it has seen meaning they will start forgetting nodes at some point(usually around 100 nodes in)

This isn’t great and poses routing issues. Meshcore is more traditional in that routers and repeaters are a fundamental part of the network. If you send a message, it will not be transmitted to a client, as that would be the fastest way to get to an endpoint. This is arguably more secure. However, it has another benefit in that noisy clients will not spam the network with packets. This in my option is ideal for real world networks that span over cities.

Another major difference is the number of hops, meshtastic defaults to 3 hops with a max of 7 which means you are limited in the number of nodes inbetween making large networks less feasible. Whereas meshcore has an upper limit of 64 which in my opinion is more realistic.

Cons

The official meshcore app is currently closed source. While the firmware for all devices is open with the community maintaining a large number of ports to various boards like mine. This is in my opinion a minor turn off especially since there are plans to opensource the official app at some point.

My Plans

Currently there is a limitation on my end of hardware and range. I plan to meet up with a marker community later this week. As one of the members run a PCB design firm, that is partnered with a PCB Fab I plan to pitch making a router board that is open source, and can be made in India. Along with this, see if how we should go about getting permissions for long range 865 devices. Meshtastic maybe the best option for this as we can pitch it as an alternative too telcom for edge IoT connectivity. The side benefit begin we get a decentralized communication system.

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I plan to pitch making a router board that is open source, and can be made in India

This is awesome!

I really like Reticulum, the Nomadnet application is fun to poke around in. Austin, TX has a pretty extensive Meshtastic (now Meshcore) network, but it’s pretty useless. I think Open Manet looks really promising but I haven’t seen anyone build a network with it IRL.

There is a group in Michigan trying to network their whole state using a wide array of different bands/protocols:

In my opinion, the most realistic form of a “user-controlled internet” would be Reticulum. For cities and towns over a combination of LoRa or some other unlicensed bands, and then UHF/IP for connecting the local hubs together.

There is an Android client for Reticulum called Columba that has a very cool feature that lets it auto-discover networks. It will connect to and explore every interface it sees. I have found a lot of cool Reticulum networks that way.