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Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator
- lrvick 1y agoIf you want something like this with asymmetric encryption, a qwerty keyboard, mesh range extension, and a GUI, try a T-Deck running Meshtastic.
- kingkawn 1y agoOr get a rak device that has a better antenna and range than the T deck
- hackcasual 1y agoOooh, which one has a keyboard?
- lrvick 1y agot-deck has a keyboard and is ideal for a personal handset. A G2 Basestation or rak device is ideal for node to node communication to act as a base station for range extension.
- natas 1y agoyes!!!
- junon 1y agoIsn't there a ban on encrypted amateur signals? Or is this running on a band that allows for it?
- Infernal 1y agoYes and yes. In the US, 900-930MHz (nominally the 915MHz band) is available for use with no license required so encryption is fine (similar to your 2.4GHz or 5GHz wifi access point). People interested in LoRa may also be interested in 802.11ah, or Wifi HaLOW
- Xmd5a 1y ago>802.11ah, or Wifi HaLOW Thanks a lot I wasn't aware of this technology. Turns out you can already buy gateways and boards/modules, and it seems it wasn't the case last year. Any tip on how I can power these things wirelessly ?
- Infernal 1y agoI have seen low power meshtastic devices serving things like BBSes on solar power, I’m not familiar enough with 802.11ah devices to know if solar would be feasible.
- ninalanyon 1y agoLoRa is surely mostly for machine to machine, Internet Of Things. There are lots of web pages that take it for granted that encrypted communications are not merely allowed but expected. See, for instance https://lora-alliance.org/security/ https://lora-alliance.org/security/
- subscribed 1y agoAmateur, yes, but this is not amateur radio. This is unlicenced.
- windexh8er 1y agoThe Meshtastic firmware actually has an 'Is Licensed' [0] checkbox if you want to operate with both the privileges and restrictions of operating under that license. The major upside is transmit power and the downside is not being able to use encryption. [0] https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/user/#is-licensed-ham https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/user/#is-lic...
- lrvick 1y agoI would also note that I have never once heard of enforcement on using encryption but we -have- seen enforcement of using too much transmit power without a license. So if you like, get a license, crank transmit power, then use encryption all you want and don't worry about it. It will be enforced about as fast as movie torrenting.
- throwaway81523 1y agoLora data rate is still maybe 100x or 1000x higher than I'd want. I'd like something just fast enough for text chat, let's say 10 bps (maybe 3 chars/sec with some data compression), and a fallback slower rate for messaging, like 1 bps or slower (2 minutes for a 50 char messsage). That would give another 20 or 30 db of coding gain for much better range. There could even be a .01bps mode. Finally, put it on HF for worldwide range ;). This is all deployed by hams down to around 1 cps, by the way (js8call.com).
- phreeza 1y agoI guess this would require a Ham license in most places? Apart from that i would really like a device like you describe (extremely low bps, high range).
- throwaway81523 1y agoJS9CALL on the ham bands requires a ham license but in principle you could use it on the unlicensed bands as well.
- sidewndr46 1y agoDo you mean JS8Call?
- throwaway81523 1y agoOops yes.
- akvadrako 1y agoThe Lora radios also have a longer-range 325 bits/slower mode called LR-FHSS which does frequency hopping and has 10-60 dB better sensitivity. Though only the sending part is implemented in the low power chips.
- geokon 1y agothere is also the LILYGO T-LoRa Pager https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/08/12/lilygo-t-lora-pager-is-an-esp32-s3-handheld-with-support-for-text-messaging-ai-motion-detection-and-nfc/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/08/12/lilygo-t-lora-pager-...
- Tepix 1y agoNeat! At 24mA the suggested battery will only last 10 hours. Shouldn't it be possible to use such a LoRa device - at least in listening mode without an active display - for much longer time periods?
- clbrmbr 1y agoLoRa is actually pretty thirsty on receive. You’d need some scheme for synchronization if you want to reduce power consumption.
- kingkawn 1y agoReceipt for LoRa is low power, its transmission that kills the battery
- arghwhat 1y agoFor any radio system, receiving continuously also kills battery, just not as fast as transmitting does. Low-power requires you to turn the receiver off for extended periods of time, but what you can do there is limited by how interactive the device needs to be, and how much the power the transmitter is willing to waste on retries/longer preambles. For proper low-power (e.g., devices with ≥ 1 year battery life on small batteries), you're likely to need sleep periods of minutes to hours, or only waking up on physical interaction.
- tonyarkles 1y agoSort of. Keeping the receiver on and listening 24/7 is going to still use significantly more current than not having the receiver on and putting the microcontroller into a deep sleep mode. The approach in my sibling comment explains how IoT LoRaWAN devices are able to use ~0 current the vast majority of the time and run off, say, a CR2032 battery.
- kingkawn 1y agoOk great point if the device is on it will technically use more power than off, true
- guerrilla 1y agoIt's very beautiful, but are there apps that do this? Isn't that what Briar does? I think there may have been some others. Amazing work with an ATtiny814, only 8KB. Love it.
- Xmd5a 1y agoThe distinctive element here is the hardware. Briar allows you to sync via local wifi and bluetooth (i.e. the range is tiny) but since it's a mesh network your message will be relayed eventually. This device though doesn't seem to support mesh connectivity because it doesn't have this short range limitation in the first place. It uses a LoRa chip with a range of a few kilometers. The bandwidth is tiny though, for reasons that are both technological and legal. In particular your are asked to respect a duty cycle of 1% (or even 0.1%, depending on the exact frequency you're using). That's 36seconds every hour. On top of that add some cities offer LoRaWAN gateways (between LoRa devices and the internet) and the limits are even more drastic like 10 messages per day, 51 bits being the maximum payload length. LoRa was designed for async metering of IoT devices basically. This application is pushing it to its limits I guess. I'm not an expert, I have a couple LoRa chips but never used them, however here are some back of the napkin calculations: Assuming a spread factor of 12 (very long rage, very low bandwith) and a 1% duty cycle, you can send about 40 messages per hour if they are short like "yo what's up". 50 chars -> 20 messages/hour. 100 chars -> 10 messages/hour.
- gausswho 1y agoDoes the duty cycle mean it's only sending a receiving for those 36 seconds of every hour? The hermit in me is enthused by communicating with this restriction.
- numpad0 1y agoIANAL/IIUC, it can also be, e.g., 10ms every 1000ms, and it only applies to emission side of it. You don't have to actually put away the device for an hour after picking up once if the modem is not sending 36 seconds straight. But it does divide the data rate by 100.
- patwolf 1y agoFor anyone looking for an off-the-shelf solution for wireless texting, I've used the BTECH GMRS-PRO. You can send messages on the device, but it's much easier to connect it to your phone via BLE and text through the app. However, it uses GMRS bands, not LoRA, so all the FCC restrictions apply.
- etrautmann 1y agoCan you elaborate on the restrictions? Is it just that the Baofeng allows you to transmit on some frequencies that aren’t legal or at power levels that aren’t allowed or is it not allowed in the US at all?
- sejje 1y agoYou need a ham license to do most anything with a Baofeng legally.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kingkawn 1y agoNot true, GMRS licenses are much easier to get
- wildzzz 1y agoWhile true, it's important to remember that not all ham radios that can transmit on GMRS bands are legal to do so. GMRS and FRS don't have the same "anything goes" allowances that ham operators have. Radios for these bands must be purpose built for these bands. Of course no one is going to know your compliant GMRS/FRS transmissions are coming from part 97 radio. Although most quality ham radios don't allow transmission on anything but the ham bands. The increased FCC enforcement of these Chinese radios means that many now have extra filters to reduce spurious emissions outside the ham bands, meaning they shouldn't work as well on GMRS and FRS. If you want to use GMRS, buy a GMRS radio.
- bluGill 1y agoWhile people did get really fast at typing on those num keypads, there was a lot of RSI injuries among people who did it often. a number key bad might be the best compromise despite that, but don't lose sight of just how bad they were and take effort to avoid the issues.
- DoctorOetker 1y agoAre there any free-to-tinker spectrum allocations not subject to the duty cycle limitations?
- kube-system 1y agoReminds me of what the messenger on the Cybiko was trying to be. Too bad LoRa wasn't a thing back then, it would have been more useful if it had a better range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
- ljf 1y agoI remember seeing these on some tech show here in the UK - and being in love with the idea - seemed so cool and 'archivable' for a young person to own. A few years later they were dirt cheap on ebay - new/boxed, but by then the itch had gone, but I wish now I'd bought one.
- shooker435 1y agoWhoa, I wonder if I still have my Cybiko Xtreme somewhere.
- nullsmack 1y agoIt uses the slow method where you push the same key until you get the letter you want to show up? Does anybody remember T9? You push the keys for the letters you want and it figures out what you're typing from a dictionary.
- IshKebab 1y agoYeah I thought he was going to say it uses T9 too, but it uses an inexplicably archaic chip so there's no way you could fit a dictionary on it.
- lxgr 1y agoIt's a real shame phones don't have something like this built in. I mean, we literally have satellite communication in every iPhone – or, depending on how you count, every LTE phone, period! Technically, it seems like 90% of what's required is already there anyway, but due to commercial and political pressures, we'll probably never see it happen.
- retrac 1y agoThere's a lot of cool radio-related things our smartphones could do but probably never will for regulatory/political/commercial reasons like you note. My pet idea is to make some use of longwave! You know those time signals broadcast around 60 kHz? They cover thousands of kilometres from one transmitter. At 60 kHz the wavelength is 5 kilometres long and the RF tends to diffract around objects like mountains, buildings, etc. that get in the way. Longwave tends to penetrate underground, and through Faraday cages meant for short wavelengths. Those time signals broadcast, in effect, 1 bit per second. The receiver is dead simple electronically and requires almost no energy to run. What if we broadcast a more modern error-corrected data stream? Every device could be supplied with a receive-only stream of a few hundred bits a second of whatever. I admit it's a solution somewhat in search of a problem. Weather updates? Emergency alerts?
- implements 1y ago> My pet idea is to make some use of longwave! […] At 60 kHz the wavelength is 5 kilometres long … Dim memory from my Ham Radio days that you’d need an antenna length of 1/4 the wavelength, which wouldn’t be very convenient for portable devices, unfortunately.
- lxgr 1y agoOnly for most efficient transmission. Reception just scales with antenna size, so as long as your transmitter is powerful enough in terms of effectively radiated power, you can make the receiver arbitrarily small. Many wristwatches are capable of receiving these LF time beacons, despite usually having antennas more compact than several kilometers.
- magnat 1y ago> LoRa can reach a range of up to 3 miles (4.8 km) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (16 km) in rural areas In mountainous area LoRa on 868MHz band reaches over 100km. Last month we had a stratospheric balloon with a Meshtastic node attached. It established direct (albeit intermittent) connection between Warsaw and Berlin.
- junon 1y agoWhat's the data transmission rate with the balloon, put of curiosity?
- magnat 1y agoHard limit is 3.5kbps with 148dB link budget (Medium Fast preset in Meshtastic [1]). In practice - a packet worth of hundred bytes every half a second or so. [1] https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/ https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/
- junon 1y agoIs that the cap of the whole system or can multiple users use it with individual caps of 3.5kbps? That's somehow both faster and slower than I expected.
- magnat 1y agoIf one node kept transmitting non-stop, it could push data out at 3.5kbps and no one else in that range can transmit at the same time. However, in EU there is a legal limit of 1% duty cycle on 868MHz band and collision avoidance mechanism, meaning on average you can send a packet (up to 255 bytes) once a minute.
- junon 1y agoThanks for the info, that's really interesting!
- 1y ago
- IshKebab 1y ago> ATtiny814 Why do people still use these ancient chips?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- childintime 1y ago5V devices continue popular.
- addaon 1y agoThey're cheap, robust, readily available, super easy to develop for, have a well-chosen set of peripherals that can reduce BOM even further (e.g. the CCL)… what's not to like?
- IshKebab 1y agoThey have the same price and availability as Cortex M0 chips, are more difficult to develop for (8-bit AVR ouch), and seem to have a similar number of peripherals as any microcontroller. The RP2350 is the same price and several orders of magnitude more capable for example. Really though, how many of these is he making? 3? Cost isn't a factor.
- addaon 1y ago> are more difficult to develop for (8-bit AVR ouch) I think this just comes down to philosophy. ARM gives you a way richer tool-chain… and you need it. The complexity to do anything skyrockets. You have a compiler in the loop so achieving deterministic performance is much more complicated... not to mention caches. The tooling for doing statistical analysis is infinitely better; but just sitting down with a pencil and doing static analysis will always be both simpler and more accurate. For cases where you're writing thousands of lines, I too will generally prefer ARM -- but if you're just writing a couple hundred instructions, assembly is just less to think about. Similarly philosophical is "more capable" -- an RP can handle many more use cases, I agree, but if both handle a given use case, with the same quality, then neither is more capable /for that use case/. And the one that achieves that use case at quality with the simpler implementation is, in my philosophy, preferable. Also, while there are equivalents to the CCL in other processor families, it's by no means universal; and it's not at all rare that the CCL saves one or two external chips.
- jvm___ 1y agoI'm backwoods camping next week, and we have 25 people spread out over three sites. I was thinking it would be funny to bring some old rotary dial phones and some sort of way of hooking them up, and then just have that as the intercom between sites for when dinner is ready or whatever. It's next week, so unlikely to happen and I'm not sure what technology I would need to make it all work. Something like Lora plus a way to make the phones work.
- IOT_Apprentice 1y agoThey did that on the last episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds (rotary phones).
- ixwt 1y agoDeviantOllam has a few videos on YouTube about some con/meetup thing he goes to that does just this. You might be able to get a few ideas from that.
- jonbiggums22 1y agoA couple years ago I stayed at an AirBnB and there was an old rotary phone in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I found it was merely placed there as an antique curio and wasn't hitched up with service. I felt a little cheated honestly.
- opan 1y agoChaining together a few WiFi routers and running a local IRC server with ergo could work well (so get everyone on the same WLAN even if no Internet). There is also Briar chat on mobile. Maybe Mumble for voice could work. I'd look for routers on Craigslist or eBay that are under $20 each and have OpenWrt support. Have had good luck with the Netgear R6220 in the past, but there could be other good options as well.
- slug 1y agoCheap FRS walkie-talkies, can find plenty of these on ebay if don't want to buy new (will need new batteries though). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service
- triyambakam 1y agoActually I have/had a lot of these. They can only be used with triple a batteries and don't last long. The usb c is only for development (and still lacks power so you still need batteries). The typing as maybe expected gets tiring. I tried using different compression ideas to save characters. There is no resend or reliability in the message sending. If it fails you must retype it. I can't remember exactly if it even indicates it fails? I remember testing with two devices, one in a faraday to test bad conditions. In the end they got salvaged for parts from my kids for other projects. The goal was to have a simple backup/emergency communication device and get to learn about LoRa. Not sure which other devices I will try but definitely know more what to look for now.
- chrisjj 1y ago> Actually I have/had a lot of these. They can only be used with triple a batteries and don't last long. You must be mistaking this design for another one. This one was released only a few weeks ago, and specifically offers LiPo batteries: "The PCB has space for a 2-pin JST socket that will allow you to plug in a standard LiPo battery, such as the ones supplied by Adafruit."
- pavel_lishin 1y agoA question for folks who know things I don't: if I wanted my phones to work in an area without cell signal, for just me and my family, is it possible to build a "personal" cell tower that our phones would just connect to and work, and allow us to text each other? Or is there a whole layer of auth required for our various phones to actually be able to use a fake network?
- joshmarinacci 1y agoNot really. This stuff is heavily NDA and patent encumbered. You’d be better off setting up a local wifi network and using an IP based audio call system.
- seidleroni 1y agoI'm not sure if this applies to all carriers but with many carriers if you are on wifi you can send/receive text messages and sometimes even make calls. Certainly you could use WhatsApp or similar in that case.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoNot if I'm in the middle of the woods with no connection to the outside world.
- mikestew 1y ago...with many carriers if you are on wifi you can send/receive text messages... How would you propose that those messages get routed if there is no connection to either the internet nor a cell provider?
- jonbiggums22 1y agoIsn't this what Wifi Calling is for? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_calling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_calling
- jeroenhd 1y ago
- LastTrain 1y agoI've tried and tried to use LoRA devices w/ meshtastic for various things, and can't get them to communicate reliably. Even with two devices sitting next to each other. Not even working reliably enough to be used as a toy. What am I doing wrong?
- joshmarinacci 1y agoIf you are using the lilygo tdeck, I’m working on Rust support here. https://github.com/joshmarinacci/rust-tdeck-experiments https://github.com/joshmarinacci/rust-tdeck-experiments
- loph 1y agoThanks. I'll stick to a walkie-talkie. FRS radios are cheap, easily obtainable, and will work as far or farther than this 915 MHz stuff. If you get into deep shit, some amateur FM handy-talkies are IMHO more likely to be able to get you help. Or perhaps T-Mobile's T-Satellite service if you are headed somewhere really remote. Unpopular opinion: Meshtastic is a solution in search of a problem.
- TheDudeMan 1y agoI would have loved this as a kid. Walkie-talkie range and battery life made them useless for my adventures.
- krunck 1y agoVery nice. I'd like to see one like this that uses frequencies that can pass through 200m of rock. Obviously the radio frequency will need to be much, much lower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through-the-earth_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through-the-earth_communicatio...). Why, you ask? Cave rescue situations.
- teleforce 1y agoIt's not only lower frequency, it also need robust wireless modulation that can work with very limited LoS where LoRa perform badly. LoRa is pretty much useless in your use cases. Currently we're working on a new wireless modulation that has much higher bandwidth (similar to HaLow) but 1000x better in BER performance than LoRa in limited LoS propagation model based on simulation. If we can get 100x improvement in real world testing for the high bandwidth version I'm more than happy. Our Japanese collaborators has tested the lower bandwidth version similar to LoRa bandwidth and frequency, and it work fine inside a bunker. If you're interested perhaps we can collaborate on testing the solution. Already proposed to IEEE as new wireless PHY modulation but to no avail yet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bilsbie 1y agoYou’d think with short text messages you could get way better range than even a good walkie talkie. Ie Repeat every character 1000x if you need to.
- LelouBil 1y agoI was trying to do something similar with esp32+lora development boards. And I got like 3km range in my city so it was great ! But then I wanted to make it a ""usable"" thing and started getting stuck on designing a protocol that allows multiple senders at the "same time". I thought of doing a time slice system since this whole project was inspired by a telecommunications class I had, but the issue would be that people you would need to know in advance the number of slices and your assigned one and also the devices would have to be synchronized, and I really wanted to make it dynamic, do anyone can just turn on their thing and it does a sort of handshake until everything works. If anyone has pointers It'd be very appreciated, I found out about meshtastic.org while doing this project too. In the end this was my first embedded experience, and my first embedded with Rust, so at least I got something "working" but I would love to make something as "usable" as this post.