MESH

A realistic expectation. Most of what people call "mesh" here is Meshtastic, the mesh protocol running on cheap Long Range (LoRa) radios.

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PACE PLAN

PACE — primary, alternate, contingency, emergency — is a method for planning four independent, predefined ways to communicate before you need them. Each channel is meant to be fully independent of the others, so the failure of one does not compromise the rest. When a channel fails, communication moves to the next one on the list rather than improvising a replacement. The order, and the point at which you switch, are fixed in advance. Emergency managers, first responders, and community organizers use PACE to keep communications working through jamming, equipment failure, and infrastructure loss.

A PACE plan is only useful if the crew is fluent with every TIER, not just the Primary one. It is essential that people are used to using all tiers of their plan — even outside of an emergency — so that switching under stress is muscle memory, not a first attempt.

the four tiers

Each tier must be independent of another's infrastructure. Email, group chat, and texting all riding the same cell network are not three tiers. They fail together.

write your own PACE plan

Print this page (Ctrl/Cmd-P) and fill it in on paper for your crew. Then decide your trigger points: what tells you a tier has failed and it's time to drop down tiers. Share your plan only if you want to.

A PACE plan is the order, not the details. Sort exact channels and meet-points after. It only works if you've practiced switching.

DICTIONARY

Mesh radio is a peer-to-peer text network built on cheap Long Range (LoRa) hardware. No towers, no accounts, no subscription. These are the terms you'll run into while learning it. New here? Start with the CORE group.

Want the long version with sources? That lives in the field vault.

MANIFESTO

There are people who want to help you survive.

In September 2024 the remains of Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina and took the phones down. Cell service gone for days, for weeks in some hollers.¹ Radios kept survivors connected — to each other, and to help outside. Volunteer operators passing traffic out of the mountains, names, medication lists, we're-alive messages.² This was feasible on gear that costs less than a couple months of a family phone plan and an ad-hoc infrastructure built by enough people who asked "what if?".³ Afterward, a lot of people who'd never once thought about any of this went looking for radios of their own, because they'd watched a neighbor demonstrate something the phone company would rather you never learn: the network you pay for is not the only way to communicate. The local mesh network flourished.⁴

The phone in your pocket is a rental. You pay every month for permission to be reached, and the company that grants it can revoke it, log it, throttle it, or hand it over.⁵ Every message you send takes a detour through someone else's building first — one point of failure for your whole life, with a surveillance business bolted on. A landlord.

With a cheap transceiver and a little knowledge, you can pass a message straight to the next person, and them to the next, until it lands with its intended recipient. No account, no subscription, no middleman deciding whether today is a day you get to talk. And this isn't disaster gear that sits in a closet waiting for the end of the world. A mesh stays alive because people use it as a regular alternative option, coordinating a ride, finding each other at a show, organizing on the block. Every unremarkable Tuesday message keeps the channel warm for the day it matters. Running your own infrastructure isn't preparation for some future emergency; it's the alternative already operating, and every node on the map is a small standing refusal to route your life through a landlord.

I've been teaching people about signal theory and radio communication for about 15 years. I promise that working knowledge is easy to attain. Radio is predictable, a dense mesh is a neighborhood that can talk to itself, and range is rapidly increasing.

Some basics of theory. The lower a radio wave sits on the spectrum, the harder it is to kill. High frequencies are fast and brittle — a signal at 2.4GHz (gigahertz), the band your router chokes on, wants a straight shot and gives up at the first wall. Go lower and the signal quits acting like a flashlight and starts acting like water, bending over ridgelines, seeping through drywall and wet trees. Down in the HF bands (High Frequency) where the ham operators live, three to thirty MHz (megahertz), a wave will bounce off the ionosphere and come down on another continent running less power than your phone charger pulls out of the wall.⁶ It worked in 1920 and it'll work the morning the network you pay for decides your block isn't profitable enough to keep lit.

LoRa rides the calmer end of that same physics. It runs at 915 MHz over here, well under your WiFi connection.⁷ It won't skip off the sky, and don't let anybody sell you that it will. But people keep finding the edges of what it can do. The current record is a packet caught 832 kilometers away on 25 milliwatts, about what a car keyfob uses.⁸ Strap a node to a weather balloon and it's over 1,300 km.⁹ And the gear is growing up fast: five years ago this meant soldering a bare dev board and flashing firmware over a USB cable. Now there are handheld devices with keyboards, solar repeaters that you can affix to a ridgeline and forget about for a year, wearables that pair with the phone you already carry.¹⁰ The node maps fill in a little more every month, city by city, and nobody is in charge of that.¹¹ And the slice of spectrum these radios ride on is unlicensed by design. Nobody needs permission to transmit there, and people have fought for decades to keep it that way.¹²

These radios aren't just text. In 2004, in a Catalan farm town called Gurb, a handful of neighbors got tired of waiting for telecoms that had decided rural villages weren't worth wiring — so they pointed cheap WiFi antennas at each other's rooftops and built the connection themselves. That project became guifi.net: tens of thousands of nodes today, wireless links and community-laid fiber, the largest community-owned network on earth. Neither company nor charity: everyone who joins signs the same commons agreement to keep the network open and neutral.¹³ In New York, volunteers with rooftop antennas run NYC Mesh, a member-funded community network with more than 2,000 active nodes across the five boroughs — no contracts, no data caps, pay-what-you-can.¹⁴

Underneath the newest radio gear sits Reticulum, a versatile network stack built encryption-first. Reticulum is private by default, no central servers, no identity surrendered to anyone, and will run over LoRa, packet radio, WiFi, or a scrap of old fiber without caring which.¹⁵ Put those pieces together and you get the quiet proposition under all of this: the internet was never a thing you buy from a company. It's a pile of agreements between machines, and machines answer to whoever holds the soldering iron. A second network, owned by no one, is not science fiction. Pieces of it are running right now, and some of them have been running for twenty years.

None of it will make you invisible. These radios are slow, and everything you transmit can be caught by anyone with an antenna. Encryption seals the letter, but the envelope still shows who's talking and when (anyone selling you a surveillance-proof fortress in a thirty-dollar box is lying).¹⁶ What they give you is smaller and truer: they cut out the company. They keep working when the paid network won't. They put the map of who-can-reach-whom back in your hands.

You can create a network that exists because its people decided to exist together without asking anyone. In community. In solidarity. You don't need a degree. You need someone a step ahead who's willing to turn around.

That's us.

Come learn how it works. We'll help you build the thing that keeps you reachable when everything built to profit off you goes dark.

Notes

1. Congressional Research Service, Restoration of Cell Phone Services: Hurricane Helene, IF12779 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2024), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12779; Federal Communications Commission, "Communications Status Report for Areas Impacted by Hurricane Helene," October 2024, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-406771A1.pdf. ↩︎
2. American Radio Relay League, "Ham Radio Serving Southeast US Recovery Efforts," ARRL News, October 2024, https://www.arrl.org/news/ham-radio-serving-southeast-us-recovery-efforts. ↩︎
3. Seeed Studio, "What Is Meshtastic? Build Your Off-Grid Mesh Network," Seeed Studio Blog, July 10, 2025, https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2025/07/10/meshtastic-off-grid-mesh-network/. ↩︎
4. MeshAVL, "Asheville Meshtastic & MeshCore Community," accessed July 21, 2026, https://meshavl.com/. ↩︎
5. Federal Communications Commission, "FCC Fines Largest Wireless Carriers for Sharing Location Data," news release, April 29, 2024, https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-fines-largest-wireless-carriers-sharing-location-data; Brian Krebs, "FCC Fines Major U.S. Wireless Carriers for Selling Customer Location Data," Krebs on Security, April 2024, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/fcc-fines-major-u-s-wireless-carriers-for-selling-customer-location-data/. ↩︎
6. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, "Ionosphere," accessed July 21, 2026, https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/ionosphere. ↩︎
7. Meshtastic, "LoRa Configuration," Meshtastic Documentation, accessed July 21, 2026, https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/. ↩︎
8. The Things Network, "LoRaWAN World Record Broken: 832km/517mi Using 25mW," accessed July 21, 2026, https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/article/lorawan-world-record-broken-twice-in-single-experiment-1. ↩︎
9. "The LoRaWAN Distance World Record Now Over 1300 Kilometers," Microwaves & RF, accessed July 21, 2026, https://www.mwrf.com/technologies/communications/wireless/article/21273819/microwaves-rf-the-lorawan-distance-world-record-now-over-1300-kilometers. ↩︎
10. Heltec Automation, "MeshPocket — Brings Meshtastic Communication into Daily Life," accessed July 21, 2026, https://heltec.org/meshpocket/; "Meshtastic Hardware: The Complete Guide for 2026," SmartnMagic, accessed July 21, 2026, https://smartnmagic.com/blogs/solutions/meshtastic-hardware-the-complete-guide. ↩︎
11. MeshMap, "Meshtastic Node Map," accessed July 21, 2026, https://meshmap.net/. ↩︎
12. Code of Federal Regulations, title 47, part 15 (Radio Frequency Devices), https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-15. ↩︎
13. Guifi.net, "What Is Guifi.net?," accessed July 21, 2026, https://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet; "Guifi.net: The World's Largest Community Network," Civil Society Technology Foundation, accessed July 21, 2026, https://civilsociety.dev/articles/guifi-net/. ↩︎
14. NYC Mesh, "NYC Mesh — A Community-Owned Network," accessed July 21, 2026, https://www.nycmesh.net/; Wikipedia, s.v. "NYC Mesh," last modified 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYC_Mesh. ↩︎
15. Mark Qvist, "Reticulum Network Stack," accessed July 21, 2026, https://reticulum.network/. ↩︎
16. Meshtastic, "Encryption," Meshtastic Documentation, accessed July 21, 2026, https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/encryption/. ↩︎

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