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Radio Hobbyists, Rejoice! Good News for LoRa & Mesh

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Radio Hobbyists, Rejoice! Good News for LoRa & Mesh

A set of radio devices and technologies are opening the doorway to new and revolutionary forms of communication. These have the potential to break down the over-reliance on traditional network hierarchies, and present collaborative alternatives where resistance to censorship, control and surveillance are baked into the network topography itself. Here, we look at a few of these technologies and what they might mean for the future of networked communications.

The idea of what is broadly referred to as mesh networking isn’t new: the resilience and scalability of mesh technology has seen it adopted in router and IoT protocols for decades. What’s new is cheap devices that can be used without a radio license to communicate over (relatively) large distances, or LOng RAnge, thus the moniker LoRa.

2 comments
  • I have a couple of Meshtastic radios. It's pretty neat, but one of the shortcomings is that it only works best in dense cities where there are more nodes.

    • I find reticulum to be superior in many ways, mostly because it does pages/images/voice not just messages, but also because they build in some gateways, you can connect to people with out MQTT(what you need in meshstastic to connect people from across continents etc) basically you can use any gateway form/protocol like a TCP/IP gateway, knowing that if the internet goes down you can only connect to the radio or satellite mesh etc etc but is good as it gives more options so is not useless to only off greed personal