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Chat/text over LoRa always sounded intriguing! I'm merely a 1000km away from Sicily (which antirez say they wanna cover with the network at first), I wonder if it would be possible to do what AM radio does, bounce against the ionosphere and get huge ranges for transmission? Maybe it would need way too much transmission power? Maybe hopping all the way P2P style makes more sense, although surely would be slower.

> Simple home-made driver for the SX1276 and SX1262 LoRa chip

Beware of what nailed the Meshtastic people: These chips don't have temperature dependent crystal oscillators. Transmitting more than a few milliseconds causing a temperature rise, throwing the clock off, causing transmission warpage, causing timing errors, causing transmission failures.

I tried doing something like this on an ESP32 last year, I wanted to understand how to do an actual mesh with devices that can't transmit and receive at the same time, but I didn't find documentation.

I managed to get 2 devices communicating across town at least ! (After having antenna issues)

I think there’s some real value in WANs that are independent of both the internet and existing telco infrastructure but I don’t think I would put a specific transport at the centre of its design. I think you would be much better off with something like bundle protocol v7 and delay tolerant networking as the actual centrepiece and have something like LoRa as one of many transport link options.

Maybe we are talking about a different threat model here but LoRa as the centrepiece falls apart really quickly the moment someone somewhere decides they don’t want your WAN to exist anymore.

Previously [2023]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882967