BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth

nullagent 331 points 106 comments May 03, 2026
partyon.xyz · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

codensolder

Sending photos on meshtastic

myself248

Every day, we get closer to reinventing Ricochet, 27 years later...

lormayna

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?

yborg

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.

janandonly

How does this compare to Meshtastic, MeshCore and Bitchat?

WD-42

Capping off a pretty wild week for Meshcore: https://www.pedaldrivenprogramming.com/2026/05/meshcore-is-h...

jtchang

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.

sepisoad

nice to not see some non-ai titles

varispeed

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?

syntaxing

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.

jschveibinz

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)

AlphaWeaver

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

beambot

Sounds like a solution to a problem already solved by DECT NR+ -- a 5G technology that is 'subscription free'.

the__alchemist

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.

thombles

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)?

igorramazanov

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

itrunsdoomguy

Does it run Doom?

tminuslabs

What is the max distance between nodes in the mesh

Singletail

With that frequency range, I really hope the people using it have radio licenses.

jeffhwang

Did anyone else think of LoRA [0] at first? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRA_(machine_learning)

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