92
This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service
(www.howtogeek.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
92 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
73759 readers
846 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
At that point, given the extremely small bandwidth, we might as well just use a massive wifi, everyone already has the required hardware for that instead of producing more trash for a pretty much non-existing use case.
Ever since I switched to lemmy, I constantly stumble upon people trying to guilt other people for their hobbies. That's pretty unhealthy.
Whoever reads this, don't feel guilty living your life. Spend time on whatever you're passionate about. Build new things, even if they do not have a rational use case at the moment. They might play an important role in your future.
WiFi goes down and people sometimes NEED to communicate instead of streaming Netflix.
This is just an alternate channel, if Eheran doesn't have the imagination to understand how low bandwidth can still be extremely valuable, as compared to, say, screaming at the top of your lungs to attempt to be heard 5 miles away, then... I'm not really interested in what they think.
People are just discussing the pros and cons of technology in the Technology comm. Chill out.
In trying times you're missing the big picture. If they were more commonplace, you'd have a decentralised communication network that can't be shut down by the government.
This has much greater range compared to wifi
Funny thing about Wi-Fi, it overlaps with an Amateur radio band (the 2.4GHz spec does) and so hams are allowed to run Wi-Fi with no encryption but a tremendous amount of power and high gain antennas on like the highest channels.
A portion of the 5GHz WiFI band overlaps with the 5.8GHz ham band too. There are also a few WiFi radios that will also work above the US WiFi band where they can operate without interference from other license free devices. Those are used in the HamWAN network.
You can have one or the other. If you choose high bandwidth, you're going to get very short distance because you can't do serious error correction, etc. If you choose long range, you're going to get low bandwidth because you need to include error correction, etc. In the transmissions.
Some people already are
https://map.nycmesh.net/
But the point of LoRa is in the name, long range. Wifi barely reaches outside my house. Also a WiFi mesh is dependent on a variety of complicated and proprietary networks and systems while meshtastic is entirely independent.
Isn't LoRa proprietary? Like, Meshtastic is open source, but something about the radio itself is proprietary tech?
No.
Yes. LoRa (from "long range", sometimes abbreviated as "LR") is a physical proprietary radio communication technique.[2] It is based on spread spectrum modulation techniques derived from chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technology.[3] It was developed by Cycleo, a company of Grenoble, France, and patented in 2014.
Did you have a question?