Your phone talks to a matchbox-sized radio. That radio talks to every other radio in range, and they pass your message along until it arrives. No SIM card, no mobile network, no provider, no monthly bill — just open-source firmware and licence-free radio spectrum.
The established one: open-source firmware for small LoRa radios, apps for Android and iOS, a large community and years of field testing. You flash a board, pair it over Bluetooth and you are on the mesh.
The younger challenger: a different take on routing, built around deliberate repeater roles instead of flooding every message through the whole network. Interesting where a mesh gets big or nodes get busy.
Both run on the usual ESP32 and nRF52 LoRa boards, so the case, the antenna mount and the battery holder do not care which firmware you decided to like.
You type in the app, the phone hands the message to your node over Bluetooth. The phone itself never touches the internet for this.
The node sends it out on the licence-free 868 MHz band. LoRa trades speed for reach: far too slow for pictures, plenty for text over long distances.
Every node in range repeats what it hears, so a message walks across nodes that neither you nor the recipient own. A single well-placed solar node on a hill can carry a whole valley.
Messages are encrypted for the channel key you share with your group. Other nodes forward the packets happily without being able to read them.
Fitted enclosures for the common LoRa boards: buttons and USB-C reachable, display visible, antenna where it belongs.
Weather-facing housings for repeater nodes that live outside: room for a battery and a small solar panel, mounts for pole, wall or fence.
Pocket-sized builds for hiking, festivals and events — the case, the mount, the strap loop, plus the parts list so you can source the electronics yourself.
Not yet. Right now this page is the project, not the product: the printed parts are being designed and tested, and nothing goes into the shop before we have run it outdoors ourselves. If you want a specific board covered, write to us — that is how we decide what to print first.
No. Meshtastic and MeshCore use the licence-free ISM band — in Europe 868 MHz — the same spectrum your weather station and garage-door remote live in. Standard hardware with a standard antenna keeps you inside the rules.
Honest answer: it depends entirely on terrain. Through a dense city, a few hundred metres per hop. With clear line of sight from a hill or rooftop, many kilometres. Mesh networks live or die by where the nodes sit, not by how much you spent on them.
The same instinct: infrastructure you can run yourself and nobody can switch off for you. A mesh keeps a group talking when the network is congested, censored or simply gone — a very useful thing to own before you need it.
Tell us the board you use and what it should survive — rain, roof, backpack — and it moves up the list. We answer emails within a day.
