LoRa for private emergency networking

[Nicolas George]

Hi.

I recently heard about LoRa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa), a kind
of very long distance low data bandwidth wifi / bluetooth. It is
designed for internet-of-things devices, but the bandwidth it offers is
enough to SSH and read the end of a log file and restart a daemon. Since
I have a few technically-minded friends and acquaintances living in the
same dense urban area, I am considering trying to use it to establish a
kind of private network for emergency access.

I have found these articles, about a LoRa-based USB device and its use
to do just that kind of thing:

https://unsigned.io/product/rnode/
https://unsigned.io/15-kilometre-ssh-link-with-rnode/

(It seems to be out of stock, but the design is open.)

I wonder if some people here have already had the same idea and explored
it further, especially with software readily available in Debian?

Regards,

--
Nicolas George

[Nicholas Geovanis]

On Fri, May 7, 2021, 4:48 AM Nicolas George <geo...@nsup.org> wrote:

Hi.

I recently heard about LoRa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa), a kind
of very long distance low data bandwidth wifi / bluetooth.

Thanks Nicolas I had wondered if people were thinking along these lines. And it's already written :-) 

I still wonder if anyone uses the "lowfer" radio frequencies for the same, very low bandwidth :-) 

In the US some VLF frequency ranges are unregulated and available for experimental use. Another subgroup in the radio hobbyist spectrum.