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Being able to effectively exchange information with family, friends and community members in both short-term as well as long-term disaster scenarios can literally mean the difference between surviving or going the way of The Dodo. There have been dozens of articles on SurvivalBlog about the use of radios for voice communications, and having appropriate radios and communications plans should definitely be considered a critical part of any preparedness plan. However, there's another form of communications that should be considered to complement radio communications – the ability to exchange text messages without the need for any supporting infrastructure. There are some use cases where texting can provide significant advantages, including:

• Communicating silently if you need to stay quiet

• Reviewing previously received communications

• Secure encrypted communications with minimal risk of being intercepted

• Sharing communications among a large group simultaneously

• Something that works with existing technology like cell phones and with a minimal learning curve (texting)

• Relatively compact with a long battery life

• Something that doesn't stand out in our current society like a handheld radio would

• You don't have enough radios for everyone in your extended group

Back in 2016, I found a solution called Gotenna that allowed completely off-grid text communications between mobile phones, using a device you paired with your phone via Bluetooth. I paid around $500 for four of the devices and used them regularly to send text messages among friends and family when hiking in back country, playing paintball in the woods, etc. Unfortunately, a couple of years later after selling thousands of consumer devices the greedy jerks at Gotenna decided to stop supporting the consumer market to focus on lucrative government contracts and essentially ended all support for the devices they'd sold. You could continue using the device on the phone you originally paired it with, but they shut down their registration server so it became impossible to move the device to a new phone, so when you wanted to upgrade or switch phones the devices essentially became worthless. Many people asked Gotenna to at least provide details on the registration protocol so they could set up their own registration servers and continue to use their devices, but to no avail.

Then, around 2020, a bunch of really smart people decided to start developing a similar capability called Meshtastic as an open-source project. Meshtastic is a mesh communications framework that runs on top of a radio protocol called LoRa (Long Range), which is designed to provide low-bandwidth communications over a very long range without any additional supporting infrastructure like cell towers or the Internet. This makes Metastatic an excellent choice for off-grid text communications in both short-term and long-term disaster scenarios.

LoRa

LoRa is the underlying radio communications protocol that Meshtastic runs on top of, so it helps to have a basic understanding of how it works. The official definition of LoRa is 'a proprietary spread spectrum modulation technique derived from chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technology', which is pretty much gibberish for the majority of us, but there are a number of valuable features that result from the way LoRa is implemented:

• Very long range – Meshtastic nodes running over LoRa can typically communicate well over a mile in even urban environments, and over many miles in wide open terrain. The record for Meshtastic communications with LoRa is over 200 miles between two mountain tops.

• Very low power consumption – LoRa devices can run for days on a single battery charge and can be powered by solar chargers.

• Interoperability – Any Meshtastic LoRa device can communicate with any other Meshtastic LoRa device (in the same country), regardless of manufacturer.

• Low cost – Chips that implement a LoRa transceiver only cost a few dollars.

The primary limitation of the LoRa is its bandwidth – it's only designed to send small packets of information, which are limited to around 200 characters, so it can't be used for things like streaming video or transferring large image files. For those of you who have worked in IT and are familiar with the OSI networking model, LoRa only provides the physical layer (Layer 1) of the network, much like a physical Ethernet cable that connects a computer to a router or switch. It only defines how nodes communicate information at a basic level, not what information is communicated.