There's a live stream tomorrow on the 'tube setting up a MeshCore companion for sending messages over radio waves directly instead of relying on internet providers.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Totally agree. I saw some people doing just plain text messaging and it looked fairly snappy. I assume we're miles away from the idea of pushing pixels on LoRa for a while.
If there's a, say, incident that makes the government want to shut down internet services, those text messages could cone in handy. And im sure the speed will increase as development continues; it always does.
Starting now means you'll end up being an important node later.
LoRa is already surfing on the bleeding edge of physics. There is no way to get anything more out of it, other than allocating wider EM spectrum for this usecase.
There are some radio amateurs in my area trying Meshcore on 169Mhz for example. There are also some new boards available that can do LoRa on 2.4Ghz, but both approaches have some downsides as well.
For a more stable and reliable network, we would also need radios capable of communicating on multiple channels simultaneously (remember, the whole thing started off as a reaction to really cheap, almost disposable dev boards), but now we're approaching the complexity and requirements of the traditional mobile networks.
If there is an actual emergency, I would say these are a nifty introduction to ham radio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZxR-qtGH7c
Its amazing how far you can go with a somewhat simple setup. You can go really cheap with a Baofeng.
One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can't use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the "government shut down the internet" kind of scenario.
Which, I suppose if you're already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn't a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of "consumer" devices with encryption very much still has value.
Yep i agree. Although it sounds like its trivial to break lora/tastic encryption from what was discussed online. Ill be honest i never went down that rabbit hole.
MeshCore runs at 2.73 kbps and it can send a short text message in a fraction of a second. The short turbo preset on Meshtastic is 21.88 kbps, but that's still too slow for images. The higher speed reduces the range by quite a bit too.
For images, you would be better off using WiFi HaLow, which runs several mbps on 900 MHz.
If you have a ham license, there is HamWAN and ARDEN as well. They are fast enough to stream live video. They can work over long distances, but the high gain antennas have to be aimed carefully.