I may have sent the most over engineered text message in history...
This vid touches on something that Reticulum does that no other networking stack that I know of can - bridge normal internet to off grid radios like LoRa.
And with the tooling improving by the day, client apps like Columba abstract away all the details leaving you with, what feels like any other messaging app. That’s the part I care about most: the person using it shouldn’t need to be a radio expert—or even know which link carried the message. All that complexity should live with builders like us, not with the person who just needs the message to arrive. This is the beauty of Reticulum.
In this video I tap into that and other recent developments like Heltec V4 RTNode firmware that runs the entire RNS stack on a higher tx enabled MCU like the Heltec v4 which kicks out 27dbm, now enabling new stand-alone infra options like solar nodes, or drone relays (like what I end up using in the video). Something meshtastic has been able to do for a while now Reticulum does as well.
And that process is easy as pie using a web flasher like this one.
I then modded Meshchat (see CrossTalk) to do a better job showing transport nodes that don't have LXMF delivery addresses. CrossTalk is my experimental MeshChat fork, not a client I’m trying to push. It just lets me add features on the fly—like exposing the transport nodes carrying these messages.
Last but not least, these rigs are about as inexpensive as it gets which lowers barrier to entry for anyone trying to get involved.
The route in the video was deliberately absurd, but the core building blocks are there and I don't see this movement slowing down any time soon.