Lattice + LoRa: messaging across kilometres.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cover the room you're in, maybe the building. Plug a USB-C LoRa dongle into the phone and Lattice turns into a long-range radio that reaches across a town or a national park, with no cell network anywhere in the chain.

Status: the LoRa driver and Meshtastic-over-Bluetooth are built into the app today, on both Android and iPhone. A real Lattice handshake has already crossed a physical LoRa hop between two Meshtastic boards. The long-range path is still being shaken out on real hardware. Multi-hop convergence and USB-dongle bring-up aren't finished, and every install picks up those improvements as they land.

What LoRa is.

LoRa ("Long Range") is a low-power radio standard from Semtech. Hobbyists use it, so does agriculture and asset tracking, and lately so do 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 around 30 seconds of airtime at SF7. That's slow. But it's real, it's free, and it reaches places nothing else does.

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

Get the right region. An EU868 dongle won't work legally or reliably in the US, and the same the other way round. Sellers list the band on the spec sheet, so match it to your country before you buy.

How Lattice uses it.

Compatible devices.

The Lattice driver works with USB-C LoRa dongles that expose a standard USB-CDC ACM serial endpoint and either an AT command-set or a documented serial protocol. We don't make hardware. This is a list of third-party devices that work, or that we've good reason to think will work, with the built-in driver.

Where this stands. The driver is built into the app. The list below comes from research, and hardware validation is still going. Some of the cheap USB dongles have been flaky in bring-up, so we're working through them one at a time. Meshtastic-tethered devices already work today via the Bluetooth path described further down. If you're shopping ahead, look at the chipset and the region band rather than the brand. Those are what decide 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 the phone's USB port. Most of the popular consumer LoRa devices already pair 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 and configure, then leave the device in your bag or on a windowsill and let it pair over BLE.

This is now the preferred setup for everyday use. Battery cost is lower, because the LoRa radio runs on the device's own battery rather than your phone's. And it works everywhere, iPhone included: BLE accessories don't need MFi, so there's no Apple gate to clear.

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, built the consumer-grade LoRa hardware ecosystem we're standing on. Their volunteer community has spent years deploying nodes, writing firmware and mapping coverage. Meshtastic interop is built into the app today on both Android and iPhone, so that every node anyone has ever deployed becomes a potential relay for Lattice traffic at zero cost to anyone. A real Lattice handshake has already crossed a physical LoRa hop between two Meshtastic boards. The multi-hop and bidirectional-relay parts, and the wider coordination, are still being built.

It's meant to go both ways. A Lattice phone with a LoRa dongle attached relays Meshtastic-native traffic in return, putting capacity back into the volunteer network. That bidirectional bridging is still being built. The design is documented openly in RFC-0018 (in the source repo, published with v1.0), with explicit ethical guardrails: coordinate with the project before shipping, reach for local radios first, and don't 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. Lattice's LoRa story works at all because they did the hard ecosystem work first. meshtastic.org.

One messenger, every radio.

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

All that mess stays down at the radio layer. From where you sit there's only ever one Lattice, and every message rides through whichever combination of radios happens to work at that moment. You never see the choice being made.

That principle is documented in RFC-0020 (in the source repo, published with v1.0). It's the same trick IP pulled, 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.

You're at a remote campsite. There's a power cut and no cell coverage. You send a message to your sister, who's at home in another town on a plain iPhone with no LoRa dongle. Same Lattice on both ends, and nothing for you to decide. This is the path it takes:

  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, and one ciphertext blob the whole way through. Every relay between you and your sister only ever sees encrypted bytes. The message lands in front of her on a plain iPhone, even though none of the radios in the middle is something either of you owns or has ever thought about.

So every protocol Lattice can speak makes the network a bit bigger. Every Lattice user with extra hardware makes it bigger for everyone else, and every community-deployed node along the way makes the whole thing more reliable. From your end it's one app, one address book, one chat. The radios do all the work, out of sight.

Other community networks we plan to ride on.

The full list is tracked in RFC-0019 (in the source repo, published with v1.0).

Battery cost.

A LoRa dongle sitting in idle-receive mode draws around 50 mA from the phone over USB. On a typical 4000 mAh phone that works out at roughly 15–20% of battery a day on top of Lattice's normal background cost. The actual transmits barely register: about 30 ms each, a handful of times a day for someone using it to chat.

So treat the dongle as an on-demand accessory. Plug it in for a hike, or when an outage starts, or when you're heading somewhere with no cell, and unplug it the rest of the time. A home-base phone that lives on a charger never feels the drain, which is 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 both illegal and useless.
• USB-C connector. Steer clear of micro-USB devices unless you keep a USB-C OTG adapter handy.
• Standard chipset. SX1262 (newer) or SX1276/SX1278 (older but everywhere). The driver doesn't target niche or proprietary chips, so avoid 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, so 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.