4 posts tagged with "mesh networks"

Reticulum, I2P, Yggdrasil and Nostr keep getting lined up together — and wrongly so. They are not competitors: they fix different floors of the same building. One replaces radio and routing, the second hides who talks to whom, the third hands out addresses, the fourth takes your account away from the platforms.

Reticulum is not a messenger, not a VPN and not a "network for shady business". It is a complete network stack in which the address is a key fingerprint, encryption has no off switch, and the carrier can be a LoRa radio, a piece of wire or ordinary TCP. This note takes it apart layer by layer: from the bits in the packet header to the board on the desk. The radio physics underneath is in the LoRa deep dive.

Meshtastic is not a stack or a platform but a finished product: a cheap board with a LoRa radio, a phone over Bluetooth — and a chat that works where there is neither mobile coverage nor internet. This note is about how exactly a message hops through other people's nodes, how much airtime that costs and why a mesh chokes when there are too many nodes. The radio physics underneath is in the LoRa deep dive.

Meshtastic and Reticulum sit on the same physics: a modulation that reads a signal weaker than the noise floor and pays for it in time. This note is about that physics: how a chirp works, where the range comes from, what every knob in the settings does, what the hardware is made of and what gets built on top — from LoRaWAN to drones and satellites.