alt Hacker NewsBYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
Comments
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.
Capping off a pretty wild week for Meshcore: https://www.pedaldrivenprogramming.com/2026/05/meshcore-is-h...
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
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)
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...
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.
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.
These technologies may not be illegal atm but as soon as the eu gets around to it they probably will be. These things circumvent all their control!?!
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?
Sounds like a solution to a problem already solved by DECT NR+ -- a 5G technology that is 'subscription free'.
Is the design for this open source? I’m not an rf guy so it would be really handy to be able to reuse some parts of this in my sensor network on our farm. I can do the digital and sensor part all day, but I respect the skill of rf engineering in getting decent performance out of tiny pcbs.
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.
Is the poster maybe confusing bandwidth (range of frequencies over which a single board can work) with bandwidth (data transfer speeds in bits per second)?
Did anyone else think of LoRA [0] at first?
Sending photos on meshtastic
With that frequency range, I really hope the people using it have radio licenses.
How does this compare to Meshtastic, MeshCore and Bitchat?
Cue xkcd on standards. I've been interested in mesh radio, and I keep hoping that a winner will emerge. Probably won't until a large commercial vendor gets interested and picks one.
Sounds like bs. Why would someone pay $50 for almost 10 years old hardware when there are plenty of well-supported and cheaper options like MuziWorks Duo / Ebyte / etc with newer LR1121 or LR2021 which combine both 2.4G and SubG bands in single and modern chip at 1/2 of the cost less? SX1281 and SX1281 are relics.
100x of what? As someone not too familiar with LoRa, what is the significance and how this could be used?
Say I start the node and then what?
What is the max distance between nodes in the mesh
Every day, we get closer to reinventing Ricochet, 27 years later...
[dead]
Does it run Doom?
This should be a "Show HN:" given it's author submitted and quite promotion heavy.
AFAICT, this just combined two chips on a board. And the 100x bandwidth is due to using a higher frequency chip. Nothing revolutionary.
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