eagle5.network/mesh_networks
Mesh Networks
A network with no center, that routes around its own failures.
The shape of a regular network
The internet is star-shaped from where you sit. Phone to AP, AP to router, router to ISP: one line. Take any link out and you're cut off.
Efficient, fragile, and centrally controlled: easy to manage, easy to cut, and your ISP sees everything.
The shape of a mesh
In a mesh, every node speaks to every node it can hear. No hub. Messages hop toward their destination, and if one node disappears, traffic finds another path.
No single point of failure, no central authority. Slower per-hop than fiber, but every link is free and unlicensed. When a route goes dark, the mesh combs the desert for another and, unlike Sandurz's troopers, it usually finds something.
What makes LoRa good for this
LoRa is a long-range, low-bandwidth radio modulation: speed traded for distance and battery life. Eagle 5 ships with:
- ~5 km line-of-sight range on a tiny antenna
- ~1.76 kilobits per second, about the speed of a 1980s acoustic modem
- Tens of milliwatts while listening, sub-milliwatt asleep: weeks on a small battery
- Unlicensed 915 MHz US ISM band, no permit required
It's not a WiFi replacement. No video. But for text, sensor data, and CTF flags, 1.76 kbps is plenty. A whole conversation fits in a few hundred bytes.
Other LoRa meshes: Meshtastic and Meshcore
Two other open-source projects mesh over LoRa, and both differ from Eagle 5's Reticulum stack in useful ways.
- Meshtastic: the most popular LoRa mesh firmware. Pick a channel, share a pre-shared key, devices flood messages to everyone on it. Runs on cheap ESP32/nRF boards, pairs to a phone over BLE, bridges to the internet via MQTT. Great for group text and GPS; the trade-off is flood routing and one channel-wide key instead of per-recipient identity.
- Meshcore: newer firmware favoring addressed, routed messages over flooding, with explicit repeater roles. Closer to Reticulum's “route to a destination” model.
Reticulum isn't tied to LoRa. The same cryptographic identity routes over LoRa, WiFi, ethernet, or a TCP tunnel, with end-to-end encryption by default. Meshtastic and Meshcore are LoRa-native radios; Reticulum is a networking stack that happens to use LoRa as one of its wires.
The mesh isn't the message
Mesh networks are infrastructure. The mesh moves bytes; what those bytes mean (chat, file transfer, CTF challenge, telemetry) is the application layer's problem.
Eagle 5 uses Reticulum as that layer: identity, destination addressing, multi-hop routing, and encryption. LoRa is just the wire, and the same identity works over WiFi or ethernet too. Read more about that.
Further reading
- Reticulum manual ↗: the official documentation for the networking stack Eagle 5 runs.
- Meshtastic ↗: the popular plug-and-play LoRa mesh firmware described above.
- Meshcore: the newer addressed-and-routed LoRa firmware.
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