Lattice + LoRa: messaging across kilometres.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cover the room, the building, the festival pocket. A USB-C LoRa dongle turns Lattice into a long-range radio that reaches across a town, a national park, or a stretch of coastline — with no cell network at all.

Status: LoRa support ships in M16, post-v1.0. The messenger goes out first; the long-range upgrade follows. The protocol layer is already wired for it (TransportKind::Lora) so the day the driver lands, every existing Lattice install picks it up.

What LoRa is.

LoRa ("Long Range") is a low-power radio standard from Semtech, used by hobbyists, agriculture, asset trackers, and increasingly by mesh-messenger projects like Meshtastic. It trades throughput for distance: about 5 kbps at the fast setting (SF7), down to 300 bps at the slow-and-far setting (SF12). A single Lattice packet takes ~30 seconds of airtime at SF7 — slow, but real, and free, and reaches places nothing else does.

It is regulated. Each region has its own band, power limit, and duty-cycle rules. The dongle's firmware enforces them; Lattice double-checks the region matches the country you set in the app and refuses to transmit if there's a mismatch.

Get the right region. An EU868 dongle will not work legally or reliably in the US, and vice versa. Sellers list the band on the spec sheet — match it to your country before you buy.

How Lattice uses it.

Compatible devices.

The Lattice driver targets any USB-C LoRa dongle that exposes a standard USB-CDC ACM serial endpoint and either an AT command-set or a documented serial protocol. We don't manufacture hardware — we list third-party devices that work, or that we have good reason to believe will work, with the planned lattice-transport-lora driver.

Honesty note. Until M16 ships the driver, none of these have been tested end-to-end with Lattice. The list below is what we've researched and intend to support on day one. If you're shopping ahead, focus on the chipset and region band rather than the brand — those determine whether a device can plausibly work.

USB-C dongles (Android, iPad)

Bluetooth-tethered LoRa devices (first-class on every platform)

You don't have to plug a LoRa dongle into your phone's USB port — most of the popular consumer LoRa devices already pair to the phone over Bluetooth. They run their own firmware (commonly Meshtastic), expose a BLE GATT API, and Lattice talks to them the same way the Meshtastic app does. Plug in once to charge / configure, then leave the device in your bag or on a windowsill and let it pair over BLE.

This is now Lattice's preferred setup for everyday use — battery cost is lower (the LoRa radio runs on the device's own battery, not your phone's), and it works on every platform including iPhone (no MFi requirement, since BLE accessories don't need it).

USB-only dongles (still supported, just not preferred)

Meshtastic interop — every existing Meshtastic node becomes a free relay for Lattice.

Meshtastic is the LoRa-mesh project that, more than any other, shipped the consumer-grade LoRa hardware ecosystem we're building on. Their volunteer community has spent years deploying nodes, writing firmware, and mapping coverage. Lattice's plan is to interoperate with Meshtastic — not compete with it — so that every node anyone has ever deployed becomes a potential relay for Lattice traffic at zero cost to anyone.

The relationship is bidirectional: a Lattice phone with a LoRa dongle attached relays Meshtastic-native traffic in return, contributing capacity back to the volunteer network. The plan is documented openly in RFC-0018 with explicit ethical guardrails — coordinate with the project before shipping, default to local radios first, never overload the volunteer infrastructure.

Credit: Meshtastic is the work of Kevin Hester, Sacha Weinberg, and a community of hundreds of contributors going back to 2019. The reason Lattice's LoRa story works at all is because they did the hard ecosystem work first. meshtastic.org.

One messenger, every radio.

Each of these networks — LoRa, Meshtastic, Reticulum, LoRaWAN, ultrasonic, satellite — is incompatible with every other one at the protocol layer. Different framing, different routing, different communities. We don't try to unify them; we ride on top of them.

The noise stays at the radio layer. From your perspective there's only ever one Lattice. Every message rides through whichever combination of radios actually works at that moment, and you never see the choice.

That principle is documented in RFC-0020 — same idea as IP becoming the layer that ran on top of every link layer instead of trying to merge them. We're not building yet another mesh protocol; we're building the messenger that uses all of them.

The journey of one message — concretely.

You're at a remote campsite with a power cut and no cell coverage. You send a message to your sister, who's at home in another town, on her plain iPhone with no LoRa dongle. Here's what happens — same Lattice on both ends, no choices for you to make:

  You ──BT──▶ Friend's phone (LoRa dongle)
                  │
                  └──LoRa──▶ Campsite Meshtastic node (volunteer-deployed)
                                  │
                                  └──Meshtastic relay──▶ Reticulum node, next town
                                                              │
                                                              └──Reticulum──▶ Sister's local Lattice user
                                                                                     │
                                                                                     └──BT──▶ Sister's iPhone
  

Six hops, four different radio protocols, two community-deployed networks, one ciphertext blob the entire way through. Every relay between you and your sister sees encrypted bytes. Your message ends up in front of her, on a plain iPhone, despite none of the intermediate radios being something either of you owns or thinks about.

That is the point. Every protocol Lattice can speak makes the network bigger; every Lattice user with extra hardware makes it bigger for everyone else; every community-deployed node anywhere along the path makes the whole thing more reliable. From your end it is one app, one address book, one chat. The radios are doing all of the work in the background.

Other community networks we plan to ride on.

The full list is tracked in RFC-0019.

Battery cost — be honest about it.

A LoRa dongle in idle-receive mode draws around 50 mA from the phone via USB. On a typical 4000 mAh phone, that's ~15–20% of battery per day on top of normal Lattice background cost. Active transmits are negligible (~30 ms each, a few times a day for a chat user).

We strongly recommend treating the dongle as an on-demand accessory: plug it in when you go on a hike, when an outage starts, when you're heading somewhere with no cell. Unplug it when you don't need it. A dedicated home-base phone left plugged in to a charger doesn't pay the cost — that's where always-on LoRa makes the most sense.

Buying checklist.

• Region band first. EU868 in Europe, US915 in North America, AS923 / IN865 / AU915 elsewhere. The wrong band makes the dongle illegal and useless.
• USB-C connector. Avoid micro-USB devices unless you keep a USB-C OTG adapter handy.
• Standard chipset. SX1262 (newer) or SX1276/SX1278 (older but everywhere). Avoid niche or proprietary chips — the driver doesn't target them.
• Antenna included. Some bare modules ship without an antenna and won't transmit usefully. Check the listing.
• Avoid LoRaWAN-only devices. Anything sold as a "LoRaWAN gateway" or "TTN node" expects a network server in the loop. Lattice uses raw LoRa, not LoRaWAN — the device needs to support raw mode (most do, via AT commands).

Platform support summary.

For the curious.

• Density and routing — how Lattice's mesh handles bridges between transports.
• What Lattice doesn't do — including the ranges LoRa can't cross.
• Meshtastic — the LoRa-mesh project that pioneered most of the consumer-grade LoRa hardware ecosystem we're building on. Different protocol, different tradeoffs, similar physics.
• RFC-0017 — the full technical design for LoRa integration (cross-transport bridging worked example, region-band table, power profile) ships with the source repository at v1.0.