Agree I love those LoRa devices & Meshtastic, but it requires your contacts to invest and carry additional hardware.
Now the most exiting project in that space IMHO is Reticulum because you can transparently mix transports: any radio (incl LoRa), TCP, UDP, etc. [0]
Their Sideband app [1] is not as polished as Meshtastic but you can start over the standard Internet, or I2P, yggdrasil and slowly introduce LoRa among your group of friends over time and if necessary.
Now the most exiting project in that space IMHO is Reticulum because you can transparently mix transports: any radio (incl LoRa), TCP, UDP, etc. [0]
Their Sideband app [1] is not as polished as Meshtastic but you can start over the standard Internet, or I2P, yggdrasil and slowly introduce LoRa among your group of friends over time and if necessary.
Their LXMF messaging format is also interesting.
Those people are really doing a fantastic work.
- [0] https://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html
- [1] https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband
- [2] https://github.com/markqvist/LXMF