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- Hacker News
- Is that an Espressif logo in the photo? I'm seriously impressed with their products. To me, they are like the Toyota of microcontrollers, specially after having to throw in the trash an Arduino Giga that never worked and not only was expensive on itself but also required me to purchase those dicey JTAG devices with an impossible to find plug and a heavy authenticity problem. A bit in dismay, I need to admit this is another "Chinese make'em better".by dsign
- I know it’s all open source and I’m not paying for anything so I cant be choosy. But after playing with a bunch of Lora peer to peer chat systems. All I wish is a chat service that uses haloW. Since it uses wifi backend, regular wifi should work as well.by syntaxing
- I think I can give it a pretty nice use: distributed ring signature over long distances. We can distribute people over different regions for redundancy and form long distance encryption channel to deliver a signature of some data, and use it to make consensus with enough provenance. Kind of like e-voting but with stronger assumptions.
By using a long distance communication device this eliminates the proximity strike problem. This could easily be extended to say like distributing the voting rights to different generals at different regions, and given that the device is genuine and not modified, can be a hardware voting key to say like launch the nuke in secrecy or not.
Whether adversarials can use the radio signals that it emits to triangulate you and thus track you is another story, though.
by stevefan1999 - Sounds like a solution to a problem already solved by DECT NR+ -- a 5G technology that is 'subscription free'.by beambot
- DECT is definitely neat. But it’s significantly different than LoRa. At the lowest/slowest modulation you might get single digit kilometers out of it.
Doesn’t change my excitement about it a bit though. Eager to get this onto my workbench!
by swaits - I didn't know about this. Neato. Links for the lazy:by consumer451
- Propagation (FSPL) is a lot better at 868/915 Mhz than 2.4Ghz. What is the advantage to have a "super BLE", that can propagate for few hundred meters?by lormayna
- Not much. While this is technically LoRa on 2.4GHz (which is not new), most people will associate LoRa with significantly longer range and LoRa 2.4 can do.by swaits
- There is also a Long Rage (low data rate) function built into the ESP32, claiming 1KM line of sight, see: https://www.hackster.io/news/long-range-wifi-for-the-esp32-9...by thenthenthen
- How are they increasing the bandwidth? It's a hardware limitation of the radios. Even if you run the lowest spread factor (SF) and highest bandwidth setting on the radio, it's still not great. And the radio buffer is 255 bytes. I'm also curious why they're starting a new project with the SX1276 instead of SX1262.
- Seems like this would support institutional/campus environments or changing environments where the sensors at the edge are sending higher bandwidth ultimately back to an Internet node using LoRA mesh--instead of directional WiFi?
I'm trying to envision the application of a mesh like this. These could be examples?
- interconnected nodes need to share data (like images)
- interconnected nodes are acting as a collective array of sensors (eg. geolocation)
- interconnected mesh nodes provide redundant pathways back to the central node
- interconnected mesh nodes provide spatial diversity in case of interference or jamming
- nodes are mobile (eg. drone or vehicle) and mesh provides alternative connectivity based on node location and RF attenuation (also provides longer range with mesh connectivity)
by jschveibinz - I’m guessing it’s just haloW without the licensing requirements.by syntaxing
- > an Internet node using LoRA mesh--instead of directional WiFi?
not really, the reason why Wifi is useful is that its reasonably efficient and high bandwidth. Unless you need to cover hectares of land without any buildings, its easier just to use decent wifi (ie unfi)
Mesh networking with multi-path is really hard to tune for bandwidth efficiency, throughput and power efficiency at the same time
by KaiserPro - That stuff is good for drone warfare, mesh networks already been used in Ukraine
E.g. drones geographically organize themselves into a chain with each of them serving as a mesh-network node, then each of them, including the tip of a chain, can be controlled by operators, and the whole setup is a closed network which works without requiring Internet access
- If this was good for drone warfare i think we'd see fewer carpets of fiber optic cable in the ukraineby idiotsecant
- > drones geographically organize themselves into a chain with each of them serving as a mesh-network node,
And giving away their location. Radio is prettymuch dead for drones.
by KaiserPro - Something like Trellisware's TSM waveform would be a better fit:
https://trellisware.wpengine.com/waveforms/tsm-waveform/
Nodes can cooperate to beamform and reach greater distances.
by 01100011 - > That stuff is good for drone warfare
> each of them serving as a mesh-network node
might have worked for a bit in the past, but is easily disrupted by jammers, and forced a switch to fiber-optic in-theater. People have learned from that and don't bother with radio anymore, even in new theaters.
by ninjagoo - The bandwidth of LoRa networks is really low. Anything beyond a environment sensors is stretching the design, especially on mesh networks.
Meshing two digit number of drones on a military grade reliability is a real uphill battle with chirp based protocols, as the high ToA reaches congestion fast.
by po1nt - Capping off a pretty wild week for Meshcore: https://www.pedaldrivenprogramming.com/2026/05/meshcore-is-h...by WD-42
- TBH Meshtastic's code isn't great either. It's neat to play with but not robust.by api
- Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the primary appeal of LoRa was range? Also isn't the primary factor in making long range radio go through things is the frequency? So 2.4ghz is the same frequency as consumer wifi right and thus would propagate about the same right?
It doesn't seem like this would be that useful except that the protocol is LoRa so you can have higher bandwidth between two devices if they happen to be close enough together.
by jtchang - "Going through things" isn't always necessary / is avoidable in some deployments. And 2.4GHz signals can propagate an okay distance between nodes if there aren't things to go through. (Globalstar's emergency SOS satellite constellation uses the n53 band, which is right above the 2.4GHz "wi-fi" band, and it propagates between handsets and LEO through 1400km of air just fine.)
So you could probably pull off a 2.4GHz mesh outdoors in rural areas? It'd be feasible in the same places a microwave-laser hilltop-to-hilltop link would, but instead of "fast but point-to-point" it's "slow but meshed" (and with much larger tolerance for slop — you don't need to put everything on fixed masts so they have perfect line-of-sight, you can just stick them on the tops of trees or whatever and if they wave in the wind it still works.)
Mind you, the authors' motivating use-case for the hardware seems to be their project (https://github.com/datapartyjs/MeshTNC) to (AFAICT) bridge LoRa (or some specific LoRa L2 protocol — Meshtastic, probably?) to packet radio, i.e. digital packet-switched signalling over amateur (HAM) radio bands.
In that context, the tradeoff of high throughput for low propagation makes sense. Insofar as you're working with LoRa, and want to build and experiment with a bunch of site-local devices that mesh between themselves and interoperate with LoRa data-link protocols, you'd likely be speaking something like LoRA over 2.4GHz (LoRa itself doesn't spec a way to do that, but you could make it happen within the closed ecosystem of your own home/office.)
And in that context, you could use a MeshTNC device as something like "LoRaLAN" router. It'd be something you'd keep somewhere central in your house (like a wi-fi router), plugged into power + an antenna (internal to your house, like a wi-fi router) and plugged into a packet-radio transceiver with its own even-bigger antenna, outside your house. (Like a wi-fi router being plugged into a gateway modem on its upstream WAN port.)
This MeshTNC device would then pick up signals from:
- regular LoRaWAN IoT devices and Meshtastic handsets in your building
- more custom devices in your building†, that you've built yourself, that use another MeshTNC module; where these other devices do their part of the meshing only on the 2.4GHz band, which means they don't need big fiddly external antennas like LoRa devices do, but can be quite compact
- and possibly, a separate bidirectional LoRa repeater (made from any existing "high-gain" LoRa module, i.e. the kind used in mains-powered LoRaWAN base stations) — which brings in LoRa mesh traffic from outside your building, and picks up and carries away "destined for elsewhere in this area" LoRa mesh traffic that your "LoRaLAN" device has emitted (either due to forwarding it from your 2.4GHz-only mesh handsets/devices, or due to forwarding it after receiving it from packet radio.)
Though keep in mind you only need that complexity for the 2.4GHz-only mesh devices, since there isn't an existing mesh to forward those packets. But this whole setup is still also a regular LoRa mesh, and so you can still use regular LoRa (e.g. meshtastic) handsets, and put out packets that make their way through your regional mesh, back to the packet-radio bridge in your building; and from there to who-knows-where.
† To be clear, the 2.4GHz mesh handsets would only work reliably inside your building (if the 2.4GHz antenna is inside your building); but knowing HAMs, half the point would be seeing how far away you could get from your house/office and have your 2.4GHz mesh handsets keep working. (You'd probably want to have a second MeshTNC "base station" with a building-external antenna to try that. Pleasantly, that doesn't complicate the topology; it's all still just mesh, so you can just drop that in.)
by derefr - ...or have line of sight at least. But yes higher frequencies have a bigger issue with this. A great mesh network for people who live on hill topsby jimnotgym
- > would propagate about the same right?
No. Free space loss increases with frequency.
FSP loss for 915 MHz at 10 kms is ~ -111.67 dB while for 2.4 GHz is -120 dB.
That is a 9 dB loss which is significant. It could mean the difference between a copy or just plain static though the LoRa is supposed to be copyable down to -140 dBm.
The max tx power is around 150 mW (21.76 dBm), so at 10 kms, the RSSI is 21.76-120 = -98.24 dBm which is above the -140 dBm limit.
This calculation is assuming there is no loss due to vegetation or humidity or other barriers.
by kanbankaren - LoRa would go much farther than Wifi on 2.4ghz. Lora uses Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation while wifi uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). The first being designed for extreme range while the latter for bandwidth. At 2.4ghz you could probably get LoRa connections up to 6 miles with the right antenna height.by mikeweiss
- The "100x bandwidth" claim needs to be substantiated.
There are some significant regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA, namely that neither MeshCore or Meshtastic are compliant with the actual FCC regulations. 100x bandwidth because you're breaking the rules isn't the same as 100x bandwidth legally.
Here is the issue discussing this in the MeshCore repository: https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945
by AlphaWeaver - "regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA"
There are other countries in the world.
And there are also places where there is no electromagnetic policies (think about over the oceans).
by zoobab - Seems more of an issue of outdated and de facto unenforceable regulations than an issue with the protocol.by RobotToaster
- That's just "using lora in the same band as WiFi and Bluetooth" no?by rocqua